But probably the most intriguing new discovery emerged as an unexpected surprise in a survey of the sexual activities of elderly residents of a sample neighborhood in Michigan. A team of researchers from William Beaumont Hospital, in the Detroit suburb of Royal Oak, interviewed almost 2,000 men and women over the age of60. They asked about things such as whether the men had trouble getting an erection and whether the women were still sexually active.

After the data were analyzed, the team was surprised to discover that the elderly householders who drank at least one cup of coffee a day were considerably more likely to be sexually active than those who were coffee abstainers. Sixty-two percent of the married women who drank coffee reported they were sexually active, compared with only 40 percent of the married women who didn't imbibe. Among men, the researchers found a similar connection: 36 percent of the coffee drinkers admitted they were sometimes impotent, compared with 59 percent of those who didn't drink coffee.
What's going on here? It's not exactly clear.

In their report in the Archives of Internal Medicine, the researchers point out that the caffeine in coffee belongs to a group of substances known as methylxanthines, a powerful central nervous system stimulant and smooth-muscle relaxant that is also known to enhance the response to sensory stimulation. But unfortunately, since it was aging, not coffee, th~t was the real subject of this study, the researchers failed to ask if these folks were drinking caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee - meaning that caffeine may not have been the active ingredient at all (if there even was one). It's possible, they suggest, that the coffee drinkers in this particular group just happened to be a little sexier than the rest.