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Green Tea Drinking Reduces Brain White Matter Lesions While Coffee Drinking Does Not

  • Writer: FibonacciMD
    FibonacciMD
  • 6 days ago
  • 3 min read

Culinary Medicine

coffee vs green tea

A study published in January 2025 looked at 8,766 Japanese subjects 65 years of age or older, who did not have dementia, for the effects of coffee and green tea drinking on MRI measured cerebral white matter lesions and hippocampal and total brain volumes. White matter lesions are from demyelination of nerve fibers in the brain and while there are a number of causes, they most commonly represent small blood vessel disease which can lead to dementia.


They reported that the total volume of white matter lesions was significantly reduced in green tea drinkers with the reduction increasing with the more green tea they drank per day. Four levels of daily green tea drinking were compared, 0 to 200 mls (milliliters), 201-400 mls, 401 to 600 mls, and over 601 mls per day. (a cup is equal to  240 mls)


They did not find any significant differences in the total volume of white matter lesions in coffee drinkers with increasing amounts of coffee ingestion. 


When controlling for multiple confounding factors such as hypertension, exercise, and cholesterol levels no differences were found in either tea or coffee drinkers for total brain volumes and hippocampus size. 

They performed some subgroup analyses and found that the positive effect of green tea on the reduction of white matter lesions was only found in people without a history of depression and was not present in people with a history of depression. The researchers  also reported that subjects with the ApoE ε4 gene ( a gene that if present increases risk for Alzheimer’s disease) did not demonstrate reduced white matter lesions from green tea ingestion while those without it did. The authors did suggest that the sample sizes for these two analyses might have been too small for adequate statistical evaluation. 


The authors concluded that increased green tea consumption was associated with reduced cerebral white matter lesions and that as those lesions are predictive of vascular dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, drinking green tea, especially three or more glasses per day, may help prevent dementia.


A weakness of the study was that it only had Japanese participants so the results may not be applicable to other ethnic groups. As with any study of this type, there may be unknown confounding variables and a correlation of two factors does not mean that one was definitively the cause of the other. 


Comments:

Green tea in other research has been found to have antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, neuroprotective, antihypertensive and have anti-platelet aggregation effects. In this study, drinking more daily green tea correlated to fewer white matter lesions. When controlling for multiple variables, drinking green tea did not have any effect on total brain or hippocampal volumes.  


Coffee drinking was not found to have any beneficial effect on the measured variables. 

The fact that people with a history of depression or having the ApoE ε4 gene did not show the same reduction in white matter lesions as other subjects may be due to competing metabolic processes in people with those conditions or as the authors suggest the sample size may have been too small to truly evaluate the issue. 


Possible issues with drinking green tea in large amounts include caffeinated green tea does contain a significant amount of caffeine, tannins in tea can reduce iron absorption and very high amounts of green tea ingestion may possibly damage the liver.



 


 

References

Shibata, S., Noguchi-Shinohara, M., Shima, A. et al. Green tea consumption and cerebral white matter lesions in community-dwelling older adults without dementia. npj Sci Food 9, 2 (2025). Retrieved from: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41538-024-00364-w#citeas

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