TRIP

Green tea drinkers show less disability with age: study

Reuters Health News, 2012

Thu, Feb 2 2012 Mon, Jan 30 2012 Wed, Jan 25 2012 Thu, Jan 19 2012 Thu, Jan 5 2012
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Elderly adults who regularly drink green tea may stay more agile and independent than their peers over time, a large study of Japanese adults suggests.
Green tea contains certain antioxidant chemicals -- particularly a compound known as EGCG -- that may help ward off the body-cell damage that can lead to disease.
And researchers have been studying green tea's effects on everything from cholesterol to the risk of certain cancers -- with mixed results so far.
For the new study, Japanese researchers looked at a different question: Do green-tea drinkers have any lower risk of frailty and disability as they grow old? Following nearly 14,000 adults age 65 and older, they found that people who drank the most green tea were the least likely to develop "functional disability" over the next three years.
Functional disability refers to problems with daily activities like going to the store or doing housework, or difficulty with more-basic needs like dressing and bathing.
In this study, almost 13 percent of adults who drank less than a cup of green tea per day became functionally disabled.
But the study, reported in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, did account for a range of factors that could explain the connection.
Green-tea lovers generally had healthier diets -- more fish, vegetables and fruit -- as well as more education, lower smoking rates, fewer heart attacks and strokes and greater mental sharpness.
(Studies have found that older adults with more "social support" are less likely to become disabled.) But even with those factors considered, green tea itself was tied to a lower disability risk, according to the researchers, led by Yasutake Tomata of Tohoku University Graduate School of Medicine.
People who drank at least five cups a day were one-third less likely to develop disabilities than those who had less than a cup a day.