For those of us who just can't think about starting the day without a good, strong cup of coffee it's comforting to know with each sip, along with waking up a bit, you may be warding off Alzheimer's later in life.

A team of German and French researchers, led by Dr. Christa E. Müller of the University of Bonn and Dr. David Blum of the University of Lille, are claiming caffeine has a positive effect on tau deposits, one of the major factors of Alzheimer's disease.

Once again, lab mice (as they often are) were tested for the study and bred to develop tau protein deposits in their brains. The mice given regular doses of caffeine showed to have slower memory decline than those that weren't.

More than 5 million Americans are currently living with the disease, according to the Alzheimer's Association, and the disease is the sixth leading cause of death in the U.S. Alzheimer's attacks the metabolism of brain cells and forces them to lose connection with each other. At some point it begins killing the cells and memory failure starts setting in. As more cells die off, daily tasks become more and more difficult to perform, extreme personality change begins and the brain begins to rapidly deteriorate.

The hope is that research findings will lead to a new class of drug treatment.

Of the 5.2 million that currently suffer the disease, over 200,000 are younger than 65, dispelling the myth that the disease only strikes much older people. Also, over two thirds of those afflicted are women.

The Alzheimer's Association predicts the numbers attached to the disease could potentially escalate rapidly as the baby boom generation ages. By 2050, the number of people age 65 and older with Alzheimer's could tripe to as many as 16 million, they claim, barring the development of medical breakthroughs like the one the German/French researchers seem to have discovered.

The two lead doctors behind the report, Müller and Blum, recently published the findings in the journal Neurobiology of Aging.