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More Alcohol, More Breast Cancer Risk
By Sherry Baker
Drinking alcohol has been linked to an increased risk of breast cancer. But which is most hazardous: wine, beer or hard liquor? One of the largest studies on the effects of alcohol on breast cancer risk concludes it doesn’t matter what your chosen tipple is—instead, it’s the number of drinks per day you consume that’s the key.
“We found that if women drink three or more alcoholic drinks a day of any kind, risk goes up 30 percent,” says researcher Arthur Klatsky, M.D., of Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, California, who presented the findings last September at the European Cancer Conference in Barcelona.
The most plausible explanation, he adds, is that alcohol impairs the metabolism of estrogen—which fuels breast cancer—in the liver.
Kaiser Permanente scientists studied the drinking habits of 70,033 white, African-American and Asian-American women between 1978 and 1985. When they went back to look at what had happened to the women by 2004, they found that 2,829 had been diagnosed with breast cancer.
As expected, those who drank the most alcohol earlier in life were more likely to have the disease, but even women who had consumed only one or two alcoholic drinks daily earlier in life increased their risk of breast cancer by 10 percent. The effects of alcohol on breast cancer risk is likely to be manifested years after the drinking takes place, he notes.
Choosing beer or wine over hard liquor didn’t change the risk, because each standard-size drink of wine, beer or spirits contains an equivalent amount of alcohol.
So should you stop drinking? “There is no increased risk for light drinkers who have less than one drink a day,” Klatsky says. “But a young woman in her 20s with no history of family heart disease but with a genetic risk for breast cancer would be wise to avoid alcohol entirely. On the other hand, a woman who is 60 with cardiovascular risks or problems but who isn’t at high risk for breast cancer might be better off drinking lightly because of alcohol’s heart-protective effects. Heart disease kills far more women than breast cancer.”
