Is there a known connection between increasing consumption of diet drinks and headaches?
In the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Donald R. Johns reported what appeared to be a connection between a case of migraine and the consumption of large amounts of a beverage containing NutraSweet. A thirty-one-year-old woman with a known history of well-controlled migraine headaches began drinking six to eight 12-ounce cans of diet cola sweetened with NutraSweet, 15 tablets of aspartame, and other foods containing aspartame (approximately 100 to 1500 mg) daily. About two hours after ingesting the drinks, she noticed stomach upset and a throbbing headache. When taken off aspartame, she noticed steady improvement and eventually the headaches disappeared altogether. In the May 1988 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, two letters appeared from the following physicians regarding headaches and aspartame. In the first, Dr. Richard B. Lipton and coworkers at the Montefiore Headache Unit reported that, in their studies using 171 patients, 8.2 percent of the patients who had head
