Of all cancers, 40% have modifiable risk factors, such as reducing alcohol consumption, quitting smoking, or managing body weight, the authors noted. Overall, the amount of alcohol someone drinks over time, not the type of alcoholic beverage, seems to be the most important factor in raising cancer risk. Most evidence suggests that it is the ethanol that increases the risk, not other things in the drink. But for some types of cancer, most notably breast cancer, consuming even small amounts of alcohol can increase risk.

1. For example, studies in Lithuania (Chenet et al. 2001) found that cardiovascular deaths increased on weekends, when heavy drinking is more common.
2. The types of cancer with the most cases linked to alcohol use were cancers of the esophagus and liver and, in women, breast cancer, the researchers reported July 13 in The Lancet Oncology.
3. Both average volume of alcohol consumption and the level of drinking before the event have been shown to affect suicide risk (Borges and Loera 2010).
4. Alcohol is the third biggest controllable risk factor for the disease, after tobacco smoking and excess weight.

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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. Lower levels of consumption result in a moderately increased risk for various cancers. At the same time, other studies have shown that moderate alcohol consumption can have protective effects against certain types of heart disease.

“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. When the researchers analyzed moderate drinking further, they found that 41,300 of those cases could be attributed to light drinking, or consumption of 10 grams or less per day. Overall, the team found that about 741,300 cancer cases in 2020, or 4.1% of the global total for that year, could be attributed to alcohol consumption. Noelle LoConte, M.D., an oncologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies alcohol and cancer risk, said that these findings confirm what doctors have long observed. Sept. 18, 2024 – Cancer is becoming a more survivable illness in the U.S., but a lack of awareness about the risks linked to alcohol and unhealthy lifestyle choices could slow this progress.

Cardiovascular Diseases

Two readers, who received no information on the names and affiliations of the authors of each study or the alcohol-related results, independently determined the eligibility of each article for inclusion in the meta-analysis. When the results of a study were published in more than one article, only the most recent and complete article was included in the analysis. Meanwhile, medical breakthroughs are fueling improved diagnosis, treatment, and survival. The report lauded treatment breakthroughs for melanoma, small cell lung cancer, and blood cancers.

Does Drinking Alcohol Cause Cancer? Learn About the Risks

This analysis found that alcohol consumption of at least 50 grams (i.e., 4 standard drinks) per day significantly increased the risk of developing any type of cancer. To evaluate the overall effects of alcohol on the cancer risk of a population, one must accurately quantify its effects on various types of tumors. To this end, researchers have performed comprehensive meta-analyses of published studies investigating the relationship between alcohol intake and the risk for numerous types of cancer. Meta-analyses are studies that pool data from several studies, thereby substantially enhancing the overall number of cases evaluated. This approach allows researchers to detect relationships that may have been overlooked in the individual studies because of the relatively small sample size and insufficient statistical power of those individual studies. This article summarizes the major findings of one such meta-analysis (Corrao et al. 1999, 2000).

But the All of Us study, Dr. Cao and her colleagues explained, offered a unique opportunity to take a robust look at people in these groups in the United States. But results from a new study suggest that this information may not be reaching people who fall into either of these two categories. Sign up here to get The Results Are In with Dr. Sanjay Gupta every Tuesday from the CNN Health team.

In the United States, a standard drink usually is considered to contain 0.6 fluid ounces (or 14 grams) of pure alcohol. This is the amount of ethanol found in approximately 12 ounces of beer, 5 ounces of wine, or 1.5 ounces of distilled spirits. Thus, for example, a glass of wine often contains more than 5 fluid ounces and therefore may correspond to one and a half or even two standard drinks. There is substantial evidence that alcohol consumption can cause unprovoked seizures, and researchers have identified plausible biological pathways that may underlie this relationship (Samokhvalov et al. 2010a). Most of the relevant studies found that a high percentage of heavy alcohol users with epilepsy meet the criteria of alcohol dependence. The biggest such wins would likely come from helping heavy drinkers cut back or quit, she added.

While alcohol consumption is declining in some areas of the world, such as parts of Europe, it’s on the rise in other areas, including China, India, and many sub-Saharan African nations. The results of this study can be explored by country and world region in the Cancers Attributable to Alcohol visualization tool, which is part of the Cancer Causes subsite of the IARC Global Cancer Observatory. The database has user-friendly facilities to produce maps and explore visualizations of the global burden of cancer attributable to alcohol consumption by sex, cancer site, and country or world region. The proportions of new cancer cases attributable to alcohol consumption were lowest in countries in Northern Africa and Western Asia, where religious-based policies have ensured that population alcohol consumption remains low and lifetime abstention rates remain high.

About 1 in 5 cancer diagnoses are related to body weight, poor diet, alcohol use, and physical inactivity. Lifestyle awareness campaigns have been effective in the past, with declining smoking rates being linked to reduced cancer rates. Alcohol usage particularly increases the risk for colorectal, liver, stomach, breast, head, neck, and throat cancers.

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. 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 echo house sober living impact differs for the different conditions.

Drinking alcohol can also lead to oxidative stress in cells, causing them to create more reactive oxygen species (chemically reactive molecules that contain oxygen). In fact, there are likely several different ways it can raise risk, and this might depend on the type of cancer. Given the study’s findings, “there’s also a need to better understand why so many cancer survivors have such high alcohol consumption,” she continued. At the moment, however, proven ways to help people with cancer limit drinking during or after completing treatment are extremely limited, Dr. DuVall said. The liver cancer the authors measured was hepatocellular carcinoma, the most common type of primary liver cancer – cancer that begins in your liver, rather than spreading to your liver from other organs.