How caffeine affects herpes is bifold. Research has found that it has both negative and positive effects. Let’s start with the ingestion of caffeine in your morning cup of coffee. This common way of ‘waking up’ in the morning actually stimulates your adrenal glands to produce adrenalin, the hormone that gives you the ‘fight or flight’ response.

As the caffeine affect herpes stimulates the adrenal glands to produce the adrenalin the body become depleted from the hormone and is placed under a great deal of stress from the continued state of readiness for fight or flight while sitting behind the desk at work.

Compare this to the scene where you live in an area of the world where you are always under the threat of an attack. Your home could be invaded at any time. Bombs could go off over head any time of the day or night. There is no respect for personal property or personal safety. Your body and mind would quickly become over stressed and stop functioning well.

Caffeine is a drug. And, like most drugs the more your body takes the more immune it becomes to the effect of the drug. For instance, taking one cup of coffee in the morning will gradually lead to 2 or 3 to get the same response.

Combined the effect of more and more caffeine with the adrenal depletion and it isn’t long before the immune system is negatively affected allowing viruses to attack and make you sick.

The flip side of how caffeine affects herpes is the use of the drug as a topical treatment for the sores. New pharmaceutical compositions of creams with the topical use of caffeine have been found to inhibit the replication of herpes simplex virus type –1 and affects other neuronal functions that suppress the paresthesia and hypoalgesia. In other words the use of caffeine in the topical creams will help to reduce the numbness that goes along with the herpes infections and will also help to reduce the number of times the herpes virus will duplicate itself.

These results from research have implications for the development of further medications to treat the symptoms of herpes simplex viral infections both orally and genitally. How caffeine affects herpes has a dual role depending upon whether the drug (caffeine) is a part of oral intake through coffee that increases the amount of adrenalin secreted or it is a part of a topical treatment plan.

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