SOMERVILLE, Mass., Aug. 20 (Nationwide Times) — A U.S. study found that people who reported drinking at least one sugar-sweetened beverage each day had 2.45 times the risk of developing stomach cancer compared with people who reported consuming such drinks less than once a month.
The finding may be relevant to routine choices involving soda and other drinks with added sugar. But the study does not show that sugary beverages cause stomach cancer, and it does not establish the absolute risk for an individual.
What did the study find?
Researchers from the Mass General Brigham Cancer Institute analyzed data from 112,284 participants in the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study. The data covered several decades, from 1986 through 2022, according to Mass General Brigham and the study published in Gastro Hep Advances.
Across the full group, researchers recorded 278 cases of gastric cancer, another name for cancer of the stomach. That is about 0.25% of the participants over the study period. However, the study materials do not provide the absolute cancer risk for each beverage-consumption group, so the 2.45-fold figure should not be read as a person’s chance of developing the disease.
The researchers reported that the association was stronger among women in the Nurses’ Health Study. Women who consumed more than one sugar-sweetened beverage per day had a 3.04-fold higher risk than women in the very-low-consumption comparison group.
The association was also reported among men, although the supplied study summaries do not provide a separate exact risk estimate for men. The researchers also found that higher overall fructose intake was associated with a higher incidence of stomach cancer.
Which drinks were included?
Mass General Brigham said the study classified sugar-sweetened beverages as carbonated drinks, punch, lemonade and sports drinks. Other summaries of the study also refer to regular soda, energy drinks and juice with added sugar.
Artificially sweetened beverages were classified as low-calorie carbonated drinks. The researchers did not find an association between higher consumption of those drinks and increased stomach-cancer incidence after adjusting for other factors.
That result does not show that artificially sweetened beverages reduce cancer risk. It means only that the study did not observe an increased risk for the outcome it examined.
Does this prove sugary drinks cause cancer?
No. The study was observational, meaning researchers examined existing health and dietary information rather than assigning participants to drink particular beverages. Andrew T. Chan, the study’s senior author and a gastroenterologist and epidemiologist at Mass General Brigham and Massachusetts General Hospital, said the research could identify an association but could not prove cause and effect.
Researchers reported adjusting for other potential risk factors. The supplied study summaries do not list all of those factors, provide the study’s confidence intervals or explain in detail how beverage intake changed over time. As a result, the findings cannot establish whether the risk was caused by sugary drinks, fructose, broader dietary patterns or another factor related to beverage consumption.
What does the result mean for daily choices?
The study adds stomach cancer to the conditions being examined in relation to sugar-sweetened beverage consumption, but it does not show that an occasional sugary drink creates a large personal cancer risk. The total number of cases was small relative to the full cohort, and the study did not report absolute risks by consumption level.
The researchers’ result is best understood as a reason for further research into a possible relationship, rather than proof that any one beverage directly causes stomach cancer. The study was conducted in U.S. health-professional cohorts, so its findings describe an association in that population and may not apply equally to every group.
