A structured bibliometric sweep of 2,873 Scopus-indexed articles spanning 1911–2025 maps how coffee and tea research intersects with Alzheimer's disease and cognitive aging. The corpus showed 4.96% annual growth and a mean citation impact of 40.17 per document. Thematic clustering persistently anchored around oxidative stress, neuroprotection, caffeine, and polyphenols, while the most recent period (2021–2025) reveals an emergent translational axis integrating gut microbiota and deep learning methodologies. Research productivity remained concentrated in the United States, United Kingdom, and China.
Bibliometric analyses are methodologically distinct from clinical trials — they map the intellectual architecture of a field rather than test causal hypotheses. That caveat matters enormously here. The persistent prominence of oxidative stress and polyphenol pathways across a century confirms these as mechanistically credible — not merely fashionable — targets, consistent with independent human cohort studies showing 20–30% reduced Alzheimer's risk with regular coffee and green tea consumption. The emerging gut microbiota thread is the more provocative signal: recent evidence suggests caffeine and catechins reshape the gut-brain axis through microbiome-mediated neuroinflammatory modulation, potentially explaining variance that simple antioxidant models cannot. For adults, the translational picture increasingly supports moderate habitual consumption of both beverages as a low-risk cognitive health behavior. This analysis is confirmatory in framing but serves a useful function in identifying microbiome integration as the field's next mechanistic frontier.
