Diet soda may be beneficial for waistline, but its daily consumption may have intensified risk of coronary heart disease and stroke. Older adults who drank diet soda on daily basis were forty-four percent more prone to have heart attack, but the US study did not prove that the sugar-free drinks alone were to blame.
To determine the association between soft drinks and combined vascular events, including stroke, a team led by Hannah Gardener from the University of Miami Miller School Of Medicine carried out a study, involving more than twenty-five hundred adults aged sixty-nine and above from New York City.
Over the next decade about six hundred men and women suffer heart attack, stroke myocardial infarction and vascular death. This including thirty-one percent of the one hundred and sixty-three people who drank diet soda on the daily basis at the start of the study.
On the whole, daily intake of diet soda was associated with a forty-four percent elevated odds of suffering heart attack or stroke, in comparison twenty-two percent of people who rarely or never drank diet soda but had a heart attack or stroke. Lead researcher Gardener stated, what we saw was an association. These people may tend to have more unhealthy habits.
Daily diet soft drink consumption was associated with several vascular risk factors and with an increased risk for vascular events. Further research is needed before any conclusions can be made regarding the potential health consequences of diet soft drink consumption.