Alcohol and your risk of cancer

Once again, a finding that has been known for a long time has still managed to produce a great deal of consternation when the finding was re-introduced to the public as a “new” finding.

What I’m talking about is a study (published in the February issue of The Journal of the National Cancer Institute) that concluded – to huge and universal semi-anguished headlines – that a woman who drinks alcohol regularly raises her risk of breast cancer as a consequence.

In other words, what seemed to shock so many women (I got tons of email from covering this study in several media outlets), according to this study from the UK (where it’s known as the Million Women Study because they’ve enrolled over one million women in it), when it comes to alcohol and the risk of breast cancer,) there is no safe level, so the more alcohol a woman drinks over her lifetime, the higher her risk of breast cancer.

But this was not news to anyone who follows health issues because several previous studies have come to that very same conclusion, namely that alcohol is a carcinogen, and especially, it seems, carcinogenic on breast tissue.

In fact, as early as four years ago (in the British Journal of Cancer), some of the same researchers behind the Million Women Study published a report that a “woman’s risk of breast cancer rises by 6 % for each extra alcoholic drink she consumes on an average daily basis”, which is about as clear a conclusion as you can get.

So you’d think that every person, but particularly every woman, would already know that regular alcohol ingestion raises the risk of breast cancer a bit.

But nearly all of us choose to remember what (and how) we want to remember so this recent report scared a lot of women who claimed they had never heard of the alcohol-cancer link, so we should underline this connection so that it registers and stays registered: alcohol is a carcinogen, and regular ingestion of alcohol raises the risk of many cancers, including (according to this Million Women Study) cancer of the liver, cancer of the esophagus, cancer of the rectum, and (especially in conjunction with smoking) cancers of the oral cavity and larynx (other studies have linked regular alcohol intake to other cancers such as cancer of the pancreas and colon cancer).

And although the Million Women Study clearly only applied to women, there is absolutely no reason to believe that men are off the hook, so with the exception of breast cancer, which is clearly a much lesser problem in men, men can – and do – suffer all those other alcohol-related cancer mentioned earlier.