Cheryl Cox Kinney, MD, explains when night sweats warrant further evaluation, including red flags, persistent symptoms, and potential nonmenopausal causes.
|Articles|February 10, 2023
Daily Dose: Artifically-sweetened Drinks and Urinary Incontinence in Women
Author(s)Sydney Jennings
Advertisement
Patient Care brings primary care clinicians a lot of medical news every day—it’s easy to miss an important study. The Daily Dose provides a concise summary of one of the website's leading stories you may not have seen.
On February 7, 2023, we reported on a study published in Menopause that aimed to determine if higher artificially sweetened beverage consumption is associated with higher prevalence of urinary incontinence (UI) symptoms in women.
The study
Investigators conducted a secondary analysis of data from the Women's Health Initiative Observational Study, which enrolled 93 676 postmenopausal women, aged 50 to 79 years, at 40 clinical centers across the US from 1993 to 1998. The participants answered questions about consumption of artificially sweetened beverages and UI symptoms at their 3-year follow-up visit, including, “During the past 3 months, how often did you drink these beverages?” “Beverages” refer to diet drinks, such as diet soda or diet fruit drinks, with a serving size of 12 oz.
The analytic cohort comprised 80 388 women, of whom two-thirds were rare consumers of artificially sweetened beverages and 13% consumed greater than or equal to 1 serving per day. The unadjusted odds of reporting UI was 10% higher in women consuming 1 to 6 servings per week (odds ratio [OR], 1.10; 95% CI, 1.06-1.14) and 12% higher in women consuming greater than or equal to 1 serving per day (OR, 1.12; 95% CI, 1.07-1.18) compared with those who never consume or consume less than 1 serving per week. There were no significant differences for stress or urgency UI symptoms between groups. Overall, 74.7% of the analytic cohort reported UI symptoms, with 27.2% reporting stress UI, 27.3% reporting urgent UI, 14.4% reporting mixed UI, and 5.8% reporting other/unknown type of incontinence.
Note from authors
"When compared to never to less than one serving per week, women consuming greater than or equal to one serving per day of artificially sweetened beverages had 10% greater odds of reporting mixed urinary incontinence after adjustments. Amount of artificially sweetened beverage consumption was not associated with stress or urgency urinary incontinence symptoms."
Click here for more details.
Advertisement
Related to this article
TMS 2026: Menopause was coded in just 7.8% of midlife outpatient visits. Arina Chesnokova, MD, MPH, discusses diagnosis gaps, prescribing risks, and solutions for primary care.
Investigational CagriSema produced 23.1% to 26.7% weight loss across menopause stages at 68 weeks, with improvements in cardiometabolic risk factors.
TMS 2026: Nearly 67% of US women receiving elinzanetant achieved at least a 50% reduction in menopausal VMS frequency by week 12 in pooled phase 3 trial data.
TMS 2026: Only 21.7% of women initiated menopause hormone therapy, with significant racial disparities and low treatment persistence, a new study finds.
TMS 2026: OB/GYN visits had nearly 4-fold higher odds of menopause coding than family medicine visits, with disparities by race and insurance, a study found.
JoAnn Pinkerton, MD, discusses new research she presented at The Menopause Society 2026 Annual Meeting on elinzanetant for menopausal vasomotor symptoms.
TMS 2026: Women exercising at least 5 days a week reported lower perimenopause symptom scores across psychological, somatic, and urogenital domains.
Advertisement
Advertisement