Does Drinking Alcohol Cause Cancer? Learn About the Risks Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

Those studies, scientists say, didn’t adequately account for people who had quit drinking due to health problems. 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).

How does the combination of alcohol and tobacco affect cancer risk?

The public is largely unaware of the link between alcohol consumption and increased cancer risk. Cancers of the esophagus and liver accounted for more than 340,000 alcohol-attributable cancers diagnosed in 2020. The researchers estimated that, overall, about 17% of liver cancer cases and 32% of esophageal cancer cases diagnosed in 2020 were attributable to alcohol use. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism has found a noticeable increase in alcohol consumption during holidays such as Christmas and New Year’s.

1. Part of this variability may result from differences in the characteristics of the subjects included in the studies.
2. To control for this possibility, the investigators included separate analyses for men and women in their statistical models, where feasible.
3. Research gaps also exist in understanding additive, synergistic or antagonistic effects of alcohol use in cancer prevention and control.
4. 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.

National Cancer Institute

Eastern Asia and central and eastern Europe had the highest numbers of alcohol-related cancers in proportion to their populations, while northern Africa and western Asia had the lowest. 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 Alcohol use disorder and Timeline of Alcohol Withdrawal Symptoms difficult. Part of this variability may result from differences in the characteristics of the subjects included in the studies. For example, the gender of the study participants may play a role because potential differences in alcohol breakdown (i.e., metabolism) exist between men and women and may systematically influence the overall pooled estimates (Corrao et al. 1999, 2000). The increased risk of cancer among heavy drinkers is primarily attributed to the alcohol (chemically referred to as ethanol) in alcoholic beverages.

Methods Used for the Meta-Analysis

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. 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. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) writes that even if a man and woman drink the same amount of alcohol, the woman will usually have a higher blood alcohol level.

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). “If you’re pouring it yourself, a lot of people may not be doing things like using a shot glass to make a mixed drink at home. That’s a major concern with excessive alcohol consumption, that people aren’t honest with themselves,” said Dr. Abnet.

Many Americans unaware of alcohol’s cancer risks, survey shows

The report found that early-onset cancers are on the rise, including diagnoses rates for colorectal, breast, and other cancers in young adults younger than 50 years of age. 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. “With these things in mind, there’s a lot we can do for any individual at the risk of developing cancer — it’s really important to detect early or prevent it in the first place, so we don’t deal with advanced cancer situations,” he emphasized. “This includes effective tobacco control, a greater awareness and uptake of cancer screening to identify many cancers earlier at a more treatable stage, and more effective treatments that can often be delivered while minimizing toxicities. While very encouraging, the rising rates of many incident cancers also indicates that there’s much more to be done,” Hawk noted. However, barriers to certain prevention tools like vaccines and early screenings, as well as unhealthy lifestyle choices — such as excessive alcohol use — lead researchers to predict that more than 2 million new cases of cancer will be diagnosed in the U.S. in 2024.

Over the past few decades, however, several animal studies have indicated that alcohol can have a cocarcinogenic, or cancer-promoting, effect. This means that when alcohol is administered together with other known cancer-inducing agents (i.e., carcinogens), it promotes or accelerates cancer development. This effect was noted for several digestive tract cancers, specifically cancers of the esophagus and the nonglandular forestomach5 (Doll et al. 1999).

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. The researchers cited the change in public perceptions and tighter regulations for tobacco, which show the importance of public health campaigns and physicians explaining risks to their patients. Dr. Klein noted, “In less than half a century, we’ve seen major changes in the way people think about tobacco.” 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.

However, researchers have found no association between moderate consumption of red wine and the risk of developing prostate cancer (32) or colorectal cancer (33). The NCI workshop/webinar summary pointed out that few surveys have tried to capture information on alcohol consumption over a lifetime. The age at which one begins drinking, levels of consumption, and episodes of binge drinking could potentially play a role in cancer risk, but that history is rarely available. Educating the public about the cancer risk from drinking alcohol, regardless of the beverage type, is especially urgent given the increase in drinking during the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Klein said. People who said they had searched for cancer information were more likely to know about the cancer risks posed by drinking beer and by drinking liquor than those who did not. But awareness of the risk from drinking wine was similar in both those who had and hadn’t sought cancer information.