Drinking coffee may help people with Parkinson's disease to move with greater ease, although getting steady jolts of caffeine doesn't appear to alleviate the daytime sleepiness that affects certain patients, a study suggests.
Researchers set out to see if caffeine could help overcome what's called daytime somnolence, a symptom that affects some patients with Parkinson's. While they didn't find an appreciable
wake-up effect among subjects taking caffeine, the researchers were surprised to find that java's main ingredient appeared to enhance patients' mobility.
"What was significant was the movement improvement," said principal investigator Dr Ronald Postuma, a neurologist at McGill University Health Centre's research institute. "And this was present both on motor symptoms, but also on the objective scoring in the motor exam."
