It’s long been known that sugary drinks help people pack on unwanted kilograms. But new research suggests that sweetened sodas, sports drinks and even 100% fruit juice might raise your risk for some cancers.

The study couldn’t prove cause and effect, but it found that drinking as little as three to four ounces (around 90-120ml) of sugary drinks each day was tied to an 18% rise in overall risk for cancer.

Tied to obesity

Among women, a similar consumption level was tied to a 22% rise in breast cancer risk, the French research team found.

A spokesperson for the American Cancer Society (ACS) said the findings should give consumers pause, because obesity is a known risk factor for cancer.

“A lot of the research on sugar-sweetened drinks and cancer has been tied to obesity,” noted Colleen Doyle, managing director of nutrition and physical activity at the ACS. “Across the board, it’s a good idea to reduce any sugar-sweetened beverage,” she advised.

The new study was led by Mathilde Touvier, research director of nutritional epidemiology at the University of Paris. Her team collected data on more than 100 000 French men and women, average age 42, who took part in a national study.

The participants answered questions about how much of 3 300 different foods and beverages they consumed each day, and were followed for up to nine years (from 2009 to 2018).

The study uncovered links between the consumption of sugary drinks and the risk of cancer in general, and for breast cancer specifically. The investigators found no association between sugary drinks and prostate or colon cancers, but the authors stressed that too few people in the study developed these cancers to make this finding definitive.

Why the connection?

The research uncovered no links between diet sodas and other artificially sweetened beverages and cancer, although more study is needed to confirm that, the authors noted.

The connection between sugary drinks and cancer remained the same even after the team adjusted for age, sex, educational level, family history of cancer, smoking and physical activity, the researchers said.

So, why the connection? According to Touvier’s team, high-calorie drinks may raise cancer risk because sugar helps build body fat, in addition to raising blood sugar levels and inflammation – all of which are risk factors for cancer.

It’s also possible that chemicals found in these drinks might play a part in increasing cancer risk, the researchers theorised.

A group representing the beverage industry said sugary drinks can still be a part of the average diet, however.

In a statement, the American Beverage Association said: “It’s important for people to know that all beverages – either with sugar or without – are safe to consume as part of a balanced diet.

America’s leading beverage companies are working together to support consumers’ efforts to reduce the sugar they consume from our beverages by providing more choices with less sugar or zero sugar, smaller package sizes and clear calorie information right up front.”

We should drink more water

Samantha Heller is a senior clinical nutritionist at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City. She said she wasn’t surprised by the findings.

“Do we really need more evidence that consuming sugar-sweetened beverages regularly is not healthy?” Heller said. She noted that, for decades, these drinks have been linked with diseases such as obesity, type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

On the other hand, “most of us should be drinking more water than we do,” Heller said. “Being poorly hydrated can affect us in surprising ways. It can impair our driving skills, cognitive abilities, mood, energy levels, kidneys, gastrointestinal function, appearance and more.”

Study author Touvier agreed.

“The only beverage that is recommended is water,” she said. And Touvier supports public efforts to get people away from the soda-and-juices habit.

Water doesn’t have to be boring

Her team’s findings support “existing nutritional recommendations to limit sugary drinks consumption, including 100% fruit juices, as well as policy actions such as taxation and marketing restrictions targeting sugary drinks,” Touvier said.

And water doesn’t have to be boring, Heller added.

“Play around with infusing water with mint, basil, cucumber, or strawberry and lemon slices. Fill a pitcher with water and pop in your favorite herbal teas like berry, vanilla or peppermint, and chill in the refrigerator,” she suggested.

The new report was published online in the BMJ.

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Patients in dire need of an organ transplant can safely receive a new heart or lung from donors who have hepatitis C, a new clinical trial has shown.

By swiftly administering powerful antiviral drugs, doctors can prevent the organ recipient from contracting hepatitis C following their transplant, said lead researcher Dr Ann Woolley. She’s an infectious disease doctor with Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

Increase in available organs

None of the first 35 transplant patients enrolled in the trial programme have any detectable levels of hepatitis C virus in their bloodstream after at least six months, Woolley said. Additionally, she said all of their new organs are in fine working order.

The breakthrough strategy could increase the number of potential organs available to patients by 20% to 25%, Woolley said.

“We saw in our centre alone that of all the transplants we’ve done in the past two years, over a third of them have been from hepatitis C-positive donors,” Woolley said.

Although the number of organ transplants in the United States has increased by 20% over the past five years, it’s estimated that about 1 000 people die annually waiting for a new heart or lung, the researchers said in background notes.

Organs typically are washed out as much as possible before transplant, but there’s always a microscopic amount of donor blood within them, Woolley said. Within that blood lies the risk of hepatitis C infection.

“The virus doesn’t come in the organ itself. It’s not in the heart or in the lung. It comes with the blood from the donor within the organ,” Woolley explained.

Blocking viral replication

More than four out of five people who received organs in the past from hepatitis C-positive donors wound up with a chronic infection themselves, researchers said in background notes. This not only threatened the health of their livers, but in some cases damaged their new organ.

The new transplant protocol calls for recipients to receive hepatitis C antivirals starting a few hours after leaving the operating room, Woolley said. Rather than wait for the patient to develop an infection, doctors instead head hep C off at the pass.

“It blocks the viral replication from occurring,” Woolley said. “The virus needs time to get to the liver to set up shop and replicate there. By starting treatment right away, all the recipient is exposed to is a very low level of virus from the donor.”

Since the recipients are exposed to only a tiny amount of virus, they don’t have to undergo a full 12-week regimen of antivirals like people who’ve had chronic hepatitis C for months or years, Woolley said.

Instead, people who get a hep C-positive organ only have to take a four-week course of antivirals costing about $25 000 (R350 000), Woolley said.

The report, published online in the New England Journal of Medicine, said that 44 patients were initially enrolled in the study, including eight people who received new hearts and 36 who received new lungs.

New standard for transplants

But given the study’s success, enrolment has continued and a total of 69 people have received hepatitis C-positive organs to date.

About 42 of the initial 44 patients in the programme had a detectable hepatitis C viral load immediately following transplant, but the amount of virus declined to the point of being undetectable within about two weeks, the report said.

Woolley believes that this could become a new standard for transplants, particularly if the heavy cost of antiviral drugs continues to decrease the longer they are on the market.

Dr Emily Blumberg, director of transplant infectious diseases at Penn Medicine, said the new protocol “has the potential to be a big advance, because currently there is a pretty sizeable number of individuals who have hepatitis C who are potential organ donors.”

The drug regimen was not associated with any toxic effects, but doctors will have to be careful to track potential drug interactions, Blumberg said. For example, the antivirals can have interactions with statins and with certain heart medications.

‘Real’ access to drugs

“Most of the drug interactions are manageable, and we think the sooner you can start the medication, the better the potential for clearing the infection faster,” said Blumberg, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study.

Doctors will need to keep tracking the progress of these patients to show that the safety of the process is long-term, she said.

The next step to making this standard care is to make sure that insurance companies will cover the cost of the antiviral treatment, Blumberg said.

“We need to be able to assure patients they will have real access to the drugs,” Blumberg said. “Some companies are committed to providing the treatment, and some are not.”

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Brain scans can improve diagnosis and management of Alzheimer’s disease, a new study claims.

Researchers assessed the use of PET scans to identify Alzheimer’s-related amyloid plaques in the brain. The study included more than 11 000 Medicare beneficiaries with mild thinking impairment or dementia of uncertain cause.

Better medical management

This scanning technique changed the diagnosis of the cause of mental impairment in more than one-third of the participants in the study.

The brain scan results also changed management – including the use of medications and counselling – in nearly two-thirds of cases, according to the study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

“These results present highly credible, large-scale evidence that amyloid PET imaging can be a powerful tool to improve the accuracy of Alzheimer’s diagnosis and lead to better medical management, especially in difficult-to-diagnose cases,” said study co-author Maria Carrillo, chief science officer of the Alzheimer’s Association.

“It is important that amyloid PET imaging be more broadly accessible to those who need it,” she added in an association news release.

Funding for the study came from Avid Radiopharmaceuticals Inc., General Electric Healthcare, and Life Molecular Imaging.

No cure for Alzheimer’s

“We are impressed by the magnitude of these results, which make it clear that amyloid PET imaging can have a major impact on how we diagnose and care for patients with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of cognitive decline,” said lead author Dr Gil Rabinovici. He’s a professor of neurology at the Memory and Aging Center at the University of California, San Francisco.

There is no cure for Alzheimer’s disease, but early diagnosis means that patients can receive treatment to manage symptoms and be directed to clinical trials for new drugs.

Early diagnosis also means that patients and families can plan for the future, including safety, care, legal and financial issues, and access resources and support programmes, the researchers said.

In this study, the PET scans revealed that about one-third of patients previously diagnosed with Alzheimer’s had no significant amyloid build-up, and their Alzheimer’s diagnosis was reversed.

Accurate diagnoses critical

But in nearly half of patients not previously diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, the PET scans revealed significant amyloid plaque build-up, resulting in a new diagnosis of Alzheimer’s.

One-third of the study participants who had previously been referred to Alzheimer’s clinical trials showed no sign of amyloid build-up based on PET scans. Based on those results, doctors were able to ensure that nearly all (93%) of patients referred to Alzheimer’s trials were amyloid-positive, which is critical to these trials’ success.

“Accurate diagnoses are critical to ensure patients are receiving the most appropriate treatments. In particular, Alzheimer’s medications can worsen cognitive decline in people with other brain diseases,” Rabinovici said.

“But perhaps more fundamentally, people who come into the clinic with concerns about memory problems want answers. An early, definitive diagnosis may allow individuals to be part of planning for the next phase of their lives and to make decisions that otherwise would eventually need to be made by others,” he said.

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