Around 2 decades ago, researchers asked tens of thousands of participants in the Women’s Health Initiative study how often they consumed artificially sweetened beverages over the past 3 months. Recently, they looked at how the diet sodas and fruit drinks the women drank back then correlated with their risks of stroke, coronary heart disease, and death in the intervening years.

The results, recently published in Stroke, showed higher intakes of artificially sweetened beverages were associated with increased health risks. Yasmin Mossavar-Rahmani, PhD, RD, the study’s lead author and an associate professor of clinical epidemiology and population health at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, emphasized that the work doesn’t prove cause and effect. But despite the study’s limitations, “[T]his is a time to pause and look into all these associations and maybe reconsider if we’re having excessive amounts of these drinks,” she told JAMA in a recent interview.