There are both pros and cons to drinking coffee. On the plus side, caffeine can improve memory, decrease fatigue and enhance your mental functioning. On the downside, coffee stains your teeth, gives you bad breath, raises stress level and induces stomach issues.

Fortunately, the latest research on the tasty drink is great news for coffee lovers. Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital have found that drinking caffeine may help prevent unexplained ear ringing in younger and middle-aged women. The results are published in the American Journal of Medicine.

To determine whether or not there’s a link between caffeine intake and tinnitus, researchers followed a group of more than 65,000 women, aged 30 to 44 years and without the ailment, for nearly 20 years. Based on information collected from questionnaires, the researchers identified almost 5,300 cases of reported incident tinnitus.

“We observed a significant inverse association between caffeine intake and the incidence of tinnitus among these women,” said senior author Gary Curhan, MD, ScD, a physician-researcher in the Channing Division of Network Medicine at BWH.

Interestingly, the researchers found that when examined in contrast with women who drink less than 150 mg of caffeine per day, the occurrence of unexplained ear ringing was 15 percent lower among those women who imbibed 450 to 499 mg of coffee per day.

“The reason behind this observed association is unclear,” noted Curhan. “We know that caffeine stimulates the central nervous system, and previous research has demonstrated that caffeine has a direct effect on the inner ear in both bench science and animal studies.”