Here’s another new report that says drinking coffee has benefits we already suspected … who hasn’t said “Let’s talk about it over a cup of coffee?” This report is from medpagetoday.com.

Coffee appears to protect against depression in women, and the more the better, researchers found.

In a prospective cohort study, women who drank two or three cups of coffee a day were 15% less likely to develop depression than those who drank one cup or less, according to Alberto Ascherio, MD, DrPH, of Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, and colleagues.

And the effect was slightly more pronounced for women who drank four or more cups a day, Ascherio and colleagues reported in the Sept. 26 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine.

There was no association between depression and decaffeinated coffee, suggesting that it’s the caffeine, and not other components of the beverage, that is involved, the researchers reported. However, they cautioned that the longitudinal study can only suggest, but not prove, that is true.

There was also an interaction that the researchers described as “marginally significant” — at P=0.06 – between smoking and coffee drinking that appeared to increase the benefit for smokers.

Caffeine is regarded as the most widely used central nervous system stimulant in the world, with about 80% of consumption in the form of coffee, the researchers noted. Many studies have looked at caffeine and other disorders, including cardiovascular disease and inflammation, but few have examined psychiatric illness.

The findings come from the Nurses Health Study, which has been following more than 120,000 women since 1976. For this analysis, the researchers studied 50,739 women who were free of depressive symptoms in 1996, when study questionnaires started to ask about use of antidepressants, and followed them through June 1, 2006. Read the entire article here.