Over 4% of all new cancer cases in 2020 were attributable to alcohol consumption, according to a study published Tuesday in the journal The Lancet Oncology. It was also easy to ignore a steady drumbeat of studies that showed that alcohol consumption is undeniably linked to cancer risk. “If you drink red wine in the hopes that you are protecting your heart health, I would look for other ways to do that,” she says. “We know for certain cancers, like breast cancer, the risk increases with each additional drink,” she says. Using blood tests to get a more accurate estimate of true alcohol consumption could also benefit future research, wrote Amy Justice, M.D., Ph.D., of Yale University, in an accompanying editorial. “The sooner we start accurately measuring alcohol exposure, the sooner we can understand the true excess burden of cancer attributable to alcohol and effectively intervene,” Dr. Justice wrote.
Risks Associated with Different Types of Alcoholic Beverages
The policy center has been tracking the American public’s knowledge, beliefs, and behaviors regarding vaccination, COVID-19, flu, RSV, and other consequential health issues through this survey panel over the past three-and-a-half years. A previous headline for this story on the NPR homepage incorrectly said 34 million cancer cases had been linked to alcohol use in 2020. “Drinking trends show that alcohol use is increasing in countries in sub-Saharan Africa. We predict that the number of cases of cancer in Southern Africa will increase by two-thirds over the next 20 years, and in Eastern Africa, cases will double,” says Rumgay. The authors said they “found that alcohol use causes a substantial burden of cancer,” but other experts say multiple limitations could weaken the strength of that proposed relationship. “Alcohol can worsen the side effects of chemotherapy and drugs used during cancer treatment,” Bevers says, listing side effects including nausea, dehydration and mouth sores.
In terms of risk assessment, this meta-analysis confirms that high levels of alcohol consumption (i.e., more than four drinks per day) result in a substantial risk of cancer development at several sites. At the same time, other studies have shown that moderate alcohol consumption can have protective effects against certain types of heart disease. Accordingly, one must determine whether moderate alcohol consumption results in an overall favorable or unfavorable risk-benefit balance for the individual drinker or an entire population. This balance depends on the age, gender, and baseline disease rates among the members of a given population. Consequently, any definite risk-benefit assessment for moderate alcohol drinking requires much more far-reaching analyses that are beyond the scope of this article but that in the future may provide important information from a public health perspective.
Statistical Methods Used in the Meta-Analysis.
The study team used DNA samples from approximately 150,000 participants (roughly 60,000 men and 90,000 women) in the China Kadoorie Biobank study and measured the frequency of the low-alcohol tolerability alleles for ALDH2 and ADH1B. The data were combined with questionnaires about drinking habits completed by participants at recruitment and subsequent follow-up visits. The participants were tracked for a median period of 11 years through linkage to health insurance records and death registers. Because these alleles are allocated at birth and are independent of other lifestyle factors (such as smoking), they can be used as a proxy for alcohol intake, to assess how alcohol consumption affects disease risks. Binge drinking—consuming five or more drinks within a few hours for men or four for women—is also likely more dangerous than any other type of drinking, Dr. Abnet explained.
Overall Global Impact of Alcohol Consumption on Burden of Disease
- The processes that the body uses to break down alcohol produce a compound called acetaldehyde, a toxin that several organizations have classified as a probable cause of cancer in people.
- While alcohol consumption can be recorded through production, export, import, sales and taxation data, unrecorded alcohol consumption describes alcohol produced and consumed outside of governmental control, according to the World Health Organization.
- The policy center has been tracking the American public’s knowledge, beliefs, and behaviors regarding vaccination, Covid-19, flu, RSV, and other consequential health issues through this survey panel over the past three-and-a-half years.
- Alcohol use is not independent of other risk factors, therefore research projects addressing alcohol as a target for cancer prevention and control should consider a multi-behavioral framework along with multilevel influences on alcohol use.
The researchers analyzed available data on population-level alcohol use in 2010 and on cancer cases in sun rocks weed 2020. The PAFs were estimated by combining data on alcohol consumption, the increased risk of developing cancer due to alcohol consumption, and estimates of cancer incidence. The acute effects of alcohol consumption on injury risk are mediated by how regularly the individual drinks. People who drink less frequently are more likely to be injured or to injure others at a given BAC compared with regular drinkers, presumably because of less tolerance (Gmel et al. 2010). This correlation was demonstrated with respect to traffic injuries in a reanalysis (Hurst et al. 1994) of a classic study conducted in Grand Rapids, Michigan (Borkenstein et al. 1974).
Alcohol Consumption and the Risk of Cancer
The results remained the same when the data were adjusted for other cancer risk factors, such as smoking, diet, physical activity, body mass and family history of cancer. To address these unknowns, researchers from Oxford Population Health, Peking University and the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, Beijing, used a genetic approach by investigating gene variants linked to lower alcohol consumption in Asian populations. Worldwide, alcohol may cause around 3 million deaths each year, including over 400,000 from cancer. With alcohol consumption rising, particularly in rapidly developing countries such as China, there is an urgent need to understand how alcohol affects disease risks in different populations. It is important to continue studying cancers linked to alcohol, as patterns of alcohol use continue to shift over time, Dr. Abnet said.
The overall effect of alcohol consumption on the global cardiovascular disease burden is detrimental (see table 2). Cardiovascular disease is a general category that includes several specific conditions, and alcohol’s impact differs for the different conditions. For example, the effect of alcohol consumption on hypertension is almost entirely detrimental, with a dose-response relationship that shows a linear increase of the relative risk with increasing consumption (Taylor et al. 2009).
“Fewer than one in three Americans recognize alcohol as a cause of cancer,” says Harriet Rumgay, researcher at the International Agency for Research on Cancer, the specialized cancer agency of the World Health Organization. “That’s similar in other high-income countries, and it’s probably even lower in other parts of the world.” For other cancer types, carcinogenesis may occur when ethanol, the main component of alcohol, is metabolized into acetaldehyde, a known cancer-causing agent.