• Posted February 10, 2026

Coffee And Tea Help Protect Brain Health

A few cups of coffee or tea each day can help your brain age more gracefully, a new study says.

About two to three cups of caffeinated joe — or one to two cups of tea — reduced dementia risk and slowed brain aging, researchers reported Feb. 9 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

However, don’t count on your morning coffee alone to preserve your brain health, researchers warned.

“While our results are encouraging, it’s important to remember that the effect size is small and there are lots of important ways to protect cognitive function as we age,” senior researcher Dr. Daniel Wang, an associate scientist at Mass General Brigham in Boston, said in a news release.

“Our study suggests that caffeinated coffee or tea consumption can be one piece of that puzzle,” Wang added.

Coffee and tea contain ingredients like caffeine that have emerged as potential factors in brain health, protecting it by reducing inflammation and cellular damage, researchers said in background notes.

To see whether these drinks actually help, researchers analyzed data from two major studies involving nearly 132,000 people. 

The studies tracked participants’ brain health and their consumption of either coffee or tea over a median 37 years, meaning half were followed longer, half for a shorter time.

People with the highest intake of caffeinated coffee had an 18% lower risk of dementia, researchers found.

They also had less brain decline as found in cognitive testing — about 7.8% versus 9.5% for those who drank little to no coffee.

Similar results were found in caffeinated tea, but not decaf coffee, suggesting that caffeine might be behind these brain benefits, researchers said.

Benefits were most pronounced in people who drank two to three cups of coffee or one to two cups of tea every day, the study found.

But even higher caffeine intake didn’t cause any negative effects, instead providing similar brain benefits as those found in a few cups of coffee, researchers said.

“We also compared people with different genetic predispositions to developing dementia and saw the same results — meaning coffee or caffeine is likely equally beneficial for people with high and low genetic risk of developing dementia,” lead researcher Dr. Yu Zhang, a doctoral student at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, said in a news release.

More information

Johns Hopkins Medicine has more on the health benefits of coffee.

SOURCE: Mass General Brigham, news release, Feb. 9, 2026