My mom drinks around three 8 ounce cups of coffee a day. She gets pounding headaches when she doesn’t get her coffee, which leads her to crabby and short-tempered. When I was in middle school I used to get so annoyed that this happened. I didn’t understand how her mood could be so dependent on a stupid drink. Fast forward to the end of my senior year and if I hadn’t had my third cup of coffee by the end of second period there was no way you would even want to look in my direction. I, like my mom, would get a debilitating headache that caused me to be irritable and cranky. I couldn’t believe that I had gotten to this level of caffeine dependency when merely four years ago I was whining about the fact that a) My mother was like this and b) How disgusting coffee tasted. On a side not I still don’t love the taste but now that I’m hooked it doesn’t matter and more often than not I drink my coffee black.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41pA04UYu6L._SY300_.jpg

As I was staring sadly at my empty cup of coffee the other morning, I got a text from my mom. She was upset because her Keurig machine had broken at work and she had a big meeting that she could not go into without coffee. I began to wonder if there was a connection between me and my mom’s similar relationships with coffee. After some research I found that there have been some discoveries that link caffeine addiction to genetics.

A gene, called PDSS2, was found in a study investigating the link between caffeine consumption and genetics. The gene was found using a genome-wide association study. More can be found about how genome-wide association studies work here, but it’s basically when you scan the genomes or DNA of a large sample of people to see if there are certain variations of genes that are connected to particular habits or diseases. When I first started reading about the gene I was expecting it to be the kind of thing where it made you think that coffee tasted good, or people with this gene were extra tired so they need more caffeine than your average person. In reality the gene is thought to control how your body metabolizes caffeine. The study found that the people who reported drinking less coffee were also those whose DNA came up in the association study with the markers of the PDSS2 gene. This led the researchers to believe that the gene may have an effect on the speed of which your body produces the proteins that metabolize the caffeine in your coffee. The study author, Nina Pirastu, stated her official hypothesis that “people with higher levels of this gene are metabolizing caffeine slower, and that’s why they’re drinking less coffee, they need to drink it less often to still have the positive effects of caffeine, like being awake and feeling less tired” (http://time.com/4464843/genetics-coffee-consumption-caffeine/). Basically the study is attempting to prove that you don’t drink more coffee because you get more tired than other people, or you like the taste more, or you watched your mom drink a lot of coffee so you mirror her behavior, it is because your body physically needs less caffeine to feel more energized throughout the day.

I guess I will never know if I get my three cup a day habit from my mom, from random chance, or because I like the routine in the morning, but this study gave me good insight into what could be a possible reason for my addiction. Who knows maybe one day I can get my genes scanned for PDSS2 and know for sure.