Our study has limitations. First, the number of cases of individual CVD and cancer was only modest at best. Therefore, our study may not have had sufficient statistical power for detecting significant results in coronary heart disease or for detecting small increases or decreases in the risk of cancer at individual sites, as associated with green tea consumption. Second, 10.4% (during 7 years of follow-up) and 13.9% (during 11 years of follow-up) of total participants were lost to follow-up. However, this proportion did not vary across the green tea consumption categories (10.6%, 9.7%, 10.2%, and 10.8% of participants from the lowest to highest green tea consumption categories, respectively, were lost to follow-up during 7 years of follow-up, and 15.2%, 14.8%, 13.4%, and 12.4% of participants, respectively, were lost to follow-up during 11 years of follow-up). Therefore, we consider it unlikely that the association between green tea consumption and mortality was substantially distorted by the effect of loss to follow-up. Third, since green tea consumption was assessed on the basis on self-administered questionnaires, some misclassification of consumption status could arise in estimating the effect of the beverage. However, this misclassification may be nondifferential and would tend to result in underestimation of the impact of green tea consumption.