Liver problems in older women linked to daily consumption of sugary drinks

For older women, there might be a higher risk of liver cancer and death from chronic liver disease if they have sugar-sweetened drinks daily, a new study finds.

The research, published on Tuesday in JAMA, tracked the beverage choices of nearly 100,000 women between the ages of 50 and 79 across the United States. The team focused on their health outcomes over the last two decades.

Experts also pointed out that the researchers also only recorded participants' drinking habits at the start of the study, in the early 1990s, and once more three years later.

They compared the health of women who consumed fewer sugar-sweetened beverages less frequently and the ones who drank sugary beverages every day.

Approximately 7 per cent of the women in the study drank sugar-sweetened beverages daily, and over 13 per cent consumed artificially sweetened drinks each day.

The researchers found that women who drank at least one sugar-sweetened beverage a day were 1.75 times as likely to be diagnosed with liver cancer compared with those who consumed three or fewer sugar-sweetened beverages per month.

Daily drinkers were nearly 2.5 times as likely to die from chronic liver disease, as well.

However, women who drank artificially sweetened beverages did not have a much higher risk of those liver problems, regardless of whether they consumed the drinks daily or not.

The researchers also looked at the number of those women who were diagnosed with liver cancer or died from chronic liver disease across a study period of, on average, nearly 21 years.

Although the findings pose a potential link between liver conditions and regularly drinking sugary beverages, the study doesn’t show a cause-and-effect relationship between sugar-sweetened drinks and liver problems.

In fact, the researchers, too, cannot pinpoint how sugar might increase the risk for liver conditions on a biological level, the report said.