According to the federal government’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2020–2025, individuals who do not drink alcohol should not start drinking for any reason. The Dietary Guidelines also recommends that people who drink alcohol do so in moderation by limiting consumption to 2 drinks or less in a day for men and 1 drink or less in a day for women. Heavy alcohol drinking is defined as having 4 or more drinks on any day or 8 or more drinks per week for women and 5 or more drinks on any day or 15 or more drinks per week for men.

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Since women rarely drink alcohol in China, the main analysis focused on men, a third of whom drank regularly (most weeks in the past year). There is a fear among some Black Americans that they may be exploited or harmed in the name of medical research. This fear can be exacerbated by a lack of transparency and understanding about the research process and potential risks and benefits. Historical instances of medical experimentation on marginalized populations, coupled with ongoing disparities in healthcare access and quality, contribute to this fear. “The high prevalence of cancer survivors engaged in hazardous drinking highlights the need for immediate interventions,” they wrote.

Too much alcohol can add extra calories to the diet, which can contribute to weight gain in some people. Alcohol may help other harmful chemicals, such as those in tobacco smoke, enter the cells lining the upper digestive tract more easily. This might explain why the combination of smoking and drinking is much more likely to cause cancers in the mouth or throat than smoking or drinking alone. Ethanol is the type of alcohol found in alcoholic drinks, whether they are beers, wines, liquors (distilled spirits), or other drinks. Alcoholic drinks contain different percentages of ethanol, but in general, a standard size drink of any type — 12 ounces of beer, 5 ounces of wine, or 1.5 ounces of 80-proof liquor — contains about the same amount of ethanol (about half an ounce). Only a few studies have tried to capture the drinking behaviors of cancer survivors, including those still how long after taking muscle relaxer can you drink alcohol undergoing treatment, said Dr. Agurs-Collins, who was not involved in this new study.

Alcohol, weight and education linked to early onset bowel cancer – new evidence

1. For example, when the investigators considered only studies reporting RRs not adjusted for tobacco use, the pooled RR for lung cancer at the highest level of alcohol consumption was 6.30.
2. The authors concluded that the cardio-protective effect of moderate alcohol consumption disappears when light to moderate drinking is mixed with irregular heavy-drinking occasions.
3. 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.
4. For those looking to lower their alcohol-use-related cancer risk, Bilchik said a person’s biological sex and metabolism may play a role in this equation, too.
5. The CDC reports that more than half of U.S. adults drink alcohol, 17% binge drink, and 6% drink heavily.

These amounts are used by public health experts in developing health guidelines about alcohol consumption and to provide a way for people to compare the amounts of alcohol they consume. However, they may not reflect the typical serving sizes people may encounter in daily life. 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. Most people know about the short-term effects of drinking alcohol, such as its effects on mood, concentration, judgment, and coordination.

This change in consumption levels may lead to an underestimate of the real association. Relationship between increasing amounts of alcohol and risk (i.e., relative risk or RR) for 14 types of cancer. The RR describes the strength of the relationship between a variable (e.g., alcohol consumption) and a disease (e.g., cancer). The RR for the disease in people without the variable (e.g., abstainers) is defined as 1.0.

Methods Used for the Meta-Analysis

Newer studies are increasingly pointing toward alcohol use as a major cancer risk factor. However, some individuals with the defective form of ALDH2 can become tolerant to the unpleasant effects of acetaldehyde and consume large amounts of alcohol. Epidemiologic studies have shown that such individuals have a higher risk of alcohol-related esophageal cancer, as well as of head and neck cancers, than individuals with the fully active enzyme who drink comparable amounts of alcohol (31). These increased risks are seen only among people who carry the ALDH2 variant and drink alcohol—they are not observed in people who carry the variant but do not drink alcohol. The CDC reports that more than half of U.S. adults drink alcohol, 17% binge drink, and 6% drink heavily.

This reluctance stems from a complex interplay of historical, cultural, and personal factors. This wave of the Annenberg Science and Public Health Knowledge (ASAPH) survey was fielded Sept. 13–22 and Sept. 26–30, 2024. The margin of sampling error (MOE) is ± 3.5 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.

In its Report on Carcinogens, the National Toxicology Program of the US Department of Health and Human Services lists consumption of alcoholic beverages as a known human carcinogen. 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. 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.

For other cancers of the digestive tract (e.g., stomach, pancreas, colon, and rectum), however, the results are less clear and generally are variable across studies, possibly because of differences in study design. Researchers also have no clear understanding of the potential mechanisms through which alcohol might act as a cocarcinogen at these sites (IARC 1988; Doll et al. 1999). Moreover, the RR estimates based on the pooled data in this meta-analysis ranged from 1.1 to 1.3 for the highest level of alcohol intake. These values indicate only a weak association of alcohol with these types of cancer, which may possibly result from residual bias in the analysis or from confounding factors, such as diet. Therefore, one cannot draw any conclusions regarding a potential causal role of alcohol in the development of these cancers. To control for this possibility, the investigators included separate analyses for men and women in their statistical models, where feasible.

The relationship between alcohol consumption and HIV infection and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) is different from that with other infectious diseases. To become infected with HIV, people must exchange body fluids, in most cases either by injecting drugs with a contaminated needle or, more commonly in low-income societies, engaging in unsafe sex. Researchers frequently have pointed out that personality characteristics, such as a propensity for risk-taking, sensation-seeking, and sexual compulsivity, may be involved in the risk of HIV infection. Indeed, a recent consensus meeting determined that there is not yet sufficient evidence to conclude that alcohol has a causal impact on HIV infection (Parry et al. 2009). However, it can be argued that experimental studies in which alcohol consumption led to a greater inclination to engage in unsafe sex indicate that some causal relationship between alcohol and HIV infection exists (e.g., George et al. 2009; Norris et al. 2009). Alcohol consumption also has been linked to cancers of the large bowel (i.e., colon and rectum) in both men and women and to breast cancer in women, although these associations have not yet been proven unequivocally.

The breakdown of ethanol in the body can also create high levels of acetaldehyde, which can damage DNA and cause liver, head and neck, and esophageal cancers. As with other meta-analyses of published studies, the analysis presented here has various limitations and strengths. One limitation is that for most types of cancer included, the estimates of alcohol’s effects tended to vary widely among the individual studies, making interpretation of the pooled data more difficult.