If coffee could prevent Alzheimer’s

I was reading today about a study that suggested drinking coffee could delay Alzheimer’s. My first thought after reading the article was that it didn’t do my dad much good, and he drank coffee morning, noon and night.

But then I thought about it in another way. Wonder if all of my dad’s coffee drinking (I did a rough estimate based on his habits and age and estimated over 85,000 cups in his lifetime) delayed the disease by years? Dad was in his mid-seventies when he started to show signs of dementia. Maybe his love of coffee (he would drink it with anything, pizza, pasta, you name it) held off the crumbling of his mind for a few years?

Unfortunately, there’s no way to know and hindsight is 20/20. If we knew what was to come, and that his coffee habit was keeping Alzheimer’s at bay for a few years, perhaps we would have lived our lives differently. Sadly, I doubt we would have changed a thing.

Other than a cigarette, a cup of coffee is the thing that reminds me of my dad the most. Even the last time I saw him alive, he asked for a cup of coffee.