Alcohol Consumption Linked to Cancer Risk (Even Among Moderate Drinkers)
You know that drinking alcohol is bad for your liver. But just because you are a moderate drinker doesn’t mean that you are safe. According to new research, alcohol may increase the risk of cancer even among those who drink moderately.
Researchers from University of Otago, in collaboration with Global Burden of Disease Alcohol Group, used evidence that alcohol causes some types of cancer after combining dozens of large studies conducted internationally over several decades. In New Zealand, alcohol consumption is one of the common causes of breast, bowel, mouth, pharynx, oesophagus, larynx and liver.
"About 60 per cent of all alcohol-attributable cancer deaths in New Zealand women are from breast cancer. We estimated 71 breast cancer deaths in 2007 and 65 in 2012 were due to drinking, and about a third of these were associated with drinking less than two drinks a day on average. Although risk of cancer is much higher in heavy drinkers there are fewer of them, and many alcohol-related breast cancers occur in women who are drinking at levels that are currently considered acceptable," said Professor Jennie Connor of the Department of Preventive and Social Medicine at Otago Medical School.
"There was little difference between men and women in the number of cancer deaths due to alcohol, even though men drink much more heavily than women, because breast cancer deaths balanced higher numbers of deaths in men from other cancer types."
"While these alcohol-attributable cancer deaths are only 4.2 per cent of all cancer deaths under 80, what makes them so significant is that we know how to avoid them," she notes.
"Individual decisions to reduce alcohol consumption will reduce risk in those people, but reduction in alcohol consumption across the population will bring down the incidence of these cancers much more substantially, and provide many other health benefits as well.”
"We hope that better understanding of the relationship of alcohol with cancer will help drinkers accept that the current unrestrained patterns of drinking need to change."
The study was published in the journal Drug and Alcohol Review.
Source of this article:
Jennie Connor et al. Alcohol-attributable cancer deaths under 80 years of age in New Zealand, Drug and Alcohol Review
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