Daily Sugary Drinks Linked to Higher Gastric Cancer Risk, Study Finds

Adults who drink sugar-sweetened beverages every day have a higher observed risk of gastric cancer, according to a study by researchers at the Mass General Brigham Cancer Institute, while artificially sweetened drinks showed no such association. About 65% of U.S. adults report drinking at least one sugar-sweetened beverage daily, the researchers noted. The findings were published in Gastro Hep Advances.

The team analysed data from 112,284 participants in the long-running Nurses' Health Study and Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, during which 278 participants developed gastric cancer. After adjusting for other risk factors, people who drank at least one serving of a sugar-sweetened beverage a day had 2.45 times the risk of gastric cancer compared with those who drank less than one serving a month; the association appeared in both men and women, and greater overall fructose intake was also linked to higher incidence. Among women in the Nurses' Health Study, drinking more than one such beverage a day was associated with a 3.04-fold higher risk. Artificially sweetened beverages showed no such link once other factors were accounted for.

"This is the first study to demonstrate an association between sugar-sweetened beverage intake and gastric cancer in a U.S. population," said senior author Dr. Andrew T. Chan, a gastroenterologist and epidemiologist at the Mass General Brigham Cancer Institute. "Gastric cancer is the fifth leading cause of cancer death worldwide, but we've known very little about how diet might contribute to this cancer."

Infection with H. pylori bacteria is a known risk factor for gastric cancer, and the researchers examined H. pylori status in a subset of 940 participants; slightly more than a third showed evidence of infection, but it was not associated with sugar-sweetened beverage consumption. Because the study was observational, it cannot establish that the drinks caused the higher rates, and the researchers said further work is needed to confirm the association and explain it.