Data from drill down

Hello! I made use of a drill-down question to narrow down 2 fields for us to use in reporting. I picked up that client provided an outdated list for the fields and these need to be updated with some of the items changing. Some captured responses will also need to be recaptured with amended fields. My question is:
- will reloading a changed drill down list affect the data in existing responses? E.g. will I lose the data captured for that question or will it only affect new responses captured post publishing?

Much thanks