Mossavar-Rahmani Y, et al. - Researchers investigated how self-reported consumption of artificially sweetened beverages (ASB) is associated with stroke and its subtypes, coronary heart disease, and all-cause mortality in a cohort of postmenopausal US women. Outcomes revealed an increased risk of stroke, particularly small artery occlusion subtype, coronary heart disease, and all-cause mortality in correlation with higher intake of ASB.

Methods

• From the Women’s Health Initiative Observational Study, which is a multicenter longitudinal study of the health of 93,676 postmenopausal women aged 50 to 79 years at baseline enrolled from 1993 to 1998, researchers included 81,714 women in the analytic cohort.
• The mean follow-up time was 11.9 years (SD of 5.3 years) in this prospective study.
• They included participants who completed a follow-up visit 3 years after baseline in this study.

Results

• Infrequent consumption (never or <1/week) of ASB was reported in most participants (64.1%); there were only 5.1% participants who reported consuming ≥2 ASBs/day.
• Multivariate analyses revealed significantly greater likelihood of all end points (except hemorrhagic stroke), after controlling for multiple covariates, among those who reported consuming the highest level of ASB vs never or rarely consuming (<1/week).
• As per adjusted models, hazard ratios and 95% confidence intervals were 1.23 (1.02–1.47) for all stroke; 1.31 (1.06–1.63) for ischemic stroke; 1.29 (1.11–1.51) for coronary heart disease; and 1.16 (1.07–1.26) for all-cause mortality.
• They noted more than a 2-fold increased risk of small artery occlusion ischemic stroke with high consumption of ASB in women with no prior history of cardiovascular disease or diabetes mellitus (hazard ratio =2.44; 95% confidence interval, 1.47–4.04).
• Significantly increased risk of ischemic stroke was noted in correlation with high consumption of ASBs among women with body mass index ≥30 (hazard ratio =2.03; 95% confidence interval, 1.38–2.98).