Hui Chen of Zhejiang University and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and colleagues conducted a multicohort study and found that drinking soft drinks with sugar or its substitutes in old age is not associated with the risk of developing dementia. The researchers analyzed data from nearly 11,000 Americans aged 65 and older (mean age 73.2 years; 60 percent women) from the HRS, ARIC, CHAP, Rush MAP, and two generations of the Framingham Study. Cases of all-cause dementia were recorded at least two years after baseline. Statistical processing of the data was performed using Cox proportional hazards models. The results were published in JAMA Psychiatry.
The average follow-up period for participants was 10.7 years (more than 116,000 person-years in total). It turned out that the consumption of sweet drinks (carbonated and non-carbonated, as well as sweetened fruit juices) with either sugar or artificial sweeteners at this age was not associated with the risk of developing dementia: the pooled odds ratio per serving per week was 0.99 and 1.00, respectively.