Treat a Twitching Eye

As a young man I used to get an occasional twitch in my eye, which I attributed to stress (too many late nights, worry about exams), smoking too much, and drinking too much coffee. Indeed, many people believe coffee makes them “twitchy”. But now Italian researchers have studied the relationships between blepharospasm (the medical term for an involuntary blinking or spasm of the eyelid), smoking, and coffee-drinking. More specifically, they studied late onset blepharospasm, which occurs without apparent cause in older people; they reported their findings in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry.

166 patients with late-onset blepharospasm were compared with 187 healthy controls (patients’ relatives) and 228 control patients with primary hemifacial spasm (another condition due to spasm from stimulation of the facial nerve on one side of the face). Individuals who drank 1 or 2 cups of coffee a day were less likely to develop blepharospasm than those who drank less than this. There was also a delay in onset of the condition – 1.7 years for each additional cup of coffee daily. Smoking was without any effect on the likelihood of developing blepharospasm.

Blepharospasm is one type of dystonia (repetitive muscle contractions); others are writer’s cramp and torticollis (wry neck, or cervical dystonia). And all three (blepharospasm, writer’s cramp, and wry neck) can be treated by Botox. So now we must see if coffee drinking can delay the onset of writer’s cramp or stiff neck. I don’t think so, but you never know.