Could diet soft drinks cause heart attacks and strokes?

The diet sugar-free soft drink…often seen as a beneficial tool in the quest for weight loss and a staple in the diet of many people trying to lose weight that may have a sweet tooth. With almost zero calories and apparently none of the spoonfuls of sugar that has been lumped into their full-sugared counterparts, diet drinks are almost too good to be true.

However, this too good to be true mantra, may actually be fitting after the alarming findings of a new study into artificially sweetened fizzy drinks and the impact they can have on our body.

Worryingly, those people who are drinking two or more diet soft drinks each day may be a staggering 50% more likely to die because heart disease. This conclusion was arrived at after health experts looked at the diet drink consumption of nearly 60,000 people taking part in the women’s health initiative, a long-term US study into the cardiovascular health of post-menopausal women.

The average age of the women was calculated at 62.8 and all women must have had no prior history of cardiovascular problems to be involved in the study.

Through a questionnaire, women were asked to document how many diet drinks they drank over a duration of three months, with a drink being taken as a 12oz (355ml) sized beverage including diet soft and fruit drinks.

The researchers tracked the women for an average follow-up time of about 9 years, variety of negative outcomes occurred in 8.5% of those who drank at least two diet drinks each day. These negative outcomes included: coronary heart disease, congestive heart failure, heart attack, ischemic stroke, peripheral arterial disease and cardiovascular death.

In contrast, negative outcomes occurred in 6.9% of the women who drank between five and seven drinks each week, within 6.8% that had drank one to four drinks per week, and 7.2% drinking between zero and three diet drinks each month.

“Our findings are in line with and extend data from previous studies showing an association between diet drinks and metabolic syndrome,” commented Dr Ankur Vyas, of the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, lead investigator of the study. The syndrome has been linked to a number of risk factors for heart disease, such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol and obesity.

“We only found an association, so we can’t say that diet drinks cause these problems,” Dr Vyas added, highlighting there may be other reasons for the link between diet drinks and a risk of heart attack and stroke.

Dr Vyas stressed that the women who had drink two or more diet drinks each day were typically younger in age, more likely to smoke, with a higher prevalence of diabetes, high blood pressure and of being overweight, adding that further research should be conducted to see if there is an actual definite link between diet drinks and cardiovascular risk.

Incoherent text messages could signify a stroke

U.S. Doctors claim that asking patients to type out a simple text message may prove vital in helping to diagnose a stroke, which can sometimes be difficult to do.

Even if possible stroke victims are not showing typical signs of actually having a stroke – such as speech impairment – if the person has difficulty constructing a  basic text message or types incoherently with jargon, this may still help to raise the alarm.

The claims were made after researchers at Henry Ford Hospital, Detroit, U.S., reported the case of a 40-year-old man who they believe to be having a stroke and showed clear signs of ‘dystextia’ – incoherent text messaging.

This particular patient was assessed for the common symptoms of a stroke. These include:

. Facial ‘drooping’ on one side.
. Being physically unable to smile or the mouth and an eye may have drooped.
. Weakness in one or both arms – usually the person is unable to lift the affected arm(s).
. Speech may be slurred, or there may be a complete inability to talk at all.

Hospital staff saw no problems at a routine bedside test and the man was still fully able to speak, write and read. His comprehension and other factors were also found to be at a normal level.

Despite this, the man was unable to correctly text a full sentence when requested, in addition to not be able to understand the mistakes he had made in his text messages.  Doctors asked the man to type the message: ‘The doctor needs a new Blackberry’ and instead, he texted: ‘The Doctor nddds a new bb’, and believed he had typed it out correctly when asked.

The patient featured in the Henry Ford report had demonstrated similar problems prior to even going to the hospital. His wife commented that texts she received were ‘disjointed, non-fluent, and incomprehensible.’

They had said: ‘Oh baby your;’ followed by: ‘I am happy.’ After two minutes he again text his wife, this time saying: ‘I am out of it, just woke up, can’t make sense, I can’t even type, call if ur awake, love you.’

Therefore, after the text message testing, it quickly became apparently his problems were having difficulty registering language in text format. The doctors also found that he only had slight facial asymmetry and no other visible neurological problems.

However, the doctors were successfully able to diagnose the man as having suffered an acute ischemic stroke. An ischemic stroke occurs after the blood supply to the brain has been decreased or cuts off due to a number of reasons such as embolism, thrombosis, systemic hypoperfusion and venous thrombosis. The victim can be left paralysed, with speech problems and sometimes the stroke can be more fatal.

In the future, requiring patients to undergo text message testing could be a key role in diagnosing a stroke. Dr Omran Kaskar, a neurologist at Henry Ford Hospital and lead author of the research, comments: “Text messaging is a common form of communication with more than 75 billion texts sent each month. Besides the time-honoured tests we use to determine aphasia in diagnosing stroke, checking for dystextia may well become a vital tool in making such a determination. Because text messages are always time-stamped when they’re sent, they may also help establish when the stroke symptoms were at least present or even when they began.”