Sugar-sweetened drinks appear to raise risk of liver cancer and chronic liver disease in women

Postmenopausal women who consume one or more sugar sweetened beverage daily appear to have a significantly higher risk of developing liver cancer and chronic liver disease than women who have fewer than three such beverages per month.

Researchers reported these findings on August 8, 2023 in JAMA/Journal of the American Medical Association.

“To our knowledge, this is the first study to report an association between sugar sweetened beverage intake and chronic liver disease mortality. Our findings, if confirmed, may pave the way to a public health strategy to reduce risk of liver disease based on data from a large and geographically diverse cohort.” said first author Longgang Zhao, PhD, postdoctoral research fellow at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

The investigators in the observational study included and analyzed data from with 98,786 postmenopausal women aged 50 to 79 years enrolled in the Women’s Health Initiative from 1993 to 1998 at 40 clinical centers in the US.

The purpose of this study was to look for associations between intake of sugar-sweetened beverages, artificially sweetened beverages, and incidence of liver cancer and chronic liver disease mortality.

The subjects reported their usual soft drink, fruit drink (not including fruit juice) intake, and then reported artificially sweetened beverage consumption after three years.

Subjects were tracked for a median of 20.9 years.

Endpoints in the analysis were liver cancer incidence and death due to chronic liver disease. Diagnoses were verified by medical records or the National Death Index.

Among all subjects, women consuming 1 or more sugar-sweetened beverage per day had a significantly higher rate of liver cancer than women consuming 3 servings or less of sugar-sweetened beverages per month (18.0 vs 10.3 per 100 000 person-years). They also had a higher rate of chronic liver disease mortality (17.7 vs 7.1 per 100 000 person-years).

In other words, the subjects who consumed one or more sugar-sweetened beverages daily had an 85 percent higher risk of liver cancer and 68 percent higher risk of chronic liver disease mortality compared to those who had fewer than three sugar sweetened beverages per month.

The authors concluded, “In postmenopausal women, compared with consuming 3 or fewer servings of sugar-sweetened beverages per month, those who consumed 1 or more sugar-sweetened beverages per day had a higher incidence of liver cancer and death from chronic liver disease. Future studies should confirm these findings and identify the biological pathways of these associations.”