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. It doesn’t matter how much you drink – the risk to the drinker’s health starts from the first drop of any alcoholic beverage. Alcohol also reduces the body’s ability to absorb certain cancer-protective nutrients, including vitamins A, C, D, E and folate. Dr. LoConte said that she has direct conversations with her patients about drinking and other behaviors that could affect their treatment. And often she directs some of that discussion to family members and loved ones who are with the patient, essentially recruiting them to help manage the patient’s drinking. The European Code of Cancer and the American Society of Clinical Oncology have also recommend minimizing alcohol consumption for cancer prevention38,39.

A large cohort study found DHEAS levels 25% higher among women consuming at least 20 g alcohol per day compared with non-drinkers [41]. However, some of the associations among alcohol drinking premenopausal women were limited to those taking oral contraceptives [40]. Many observational studies have been conducted to identify and define the risks from drinking alcohol and cancer development. Some limitations in these studies have been identified, such as lack of sufficient adjustment of confounding factors, for example cocaine detection tobacco smoking and alcohol consumption are both common risk factors for oral cavity cancer. There are also concerns around reverse causality, with the reference categories of alcohol non-drinkers possibly including former drinkers who still have an elevated risk of cancer. There are other concerns over the accuracy of recording of alcohol exposure data where bias may be incorporated through non-participation of heavy drinkers in health studies, and under-reporting of alcohol consumption by the study subjects.

The same meta-analysis also found significant inverse associations for the risk of thyroid cancer, Hodgkin lymphoma and non-Hodgkin lymphoma [8]. The meta-analysis by WCRF did not find an increased risk of pancreatic cancer per 10 g alcohol per day (RR 1.00 (95% CI 0.99–1.01)) but there was a possible threshold effect of increased risk for intakes of around 60 g per day (RR 1.17 (95% CI 1.05–1.29)) [7]. This was a similar finding to the meta-analysis by Bagnardi and colleagues which found no increased risk at light or moderate drinking but a significant RR of 1.19 (95% 1.11–1.28) for heavy drinking [8]. Few studies have specifically examined the interaction between alcohol and the immune response in cancer patients or in experimental animals implanted with cancer cells.

1. At 56 days after tumor implantation, the number and size of pulmonary metastases were recorded for all animals.
2. Alcohol drinking disorders can lead to liver fibrosis and cirrhosis (12)–an established cause of liver cancer.
3. But it has been difficult to establish whether alcohol directly causes cancer, or if it is linked to possible confounding factors (such as smoking and diet) that could generate biased results.
4. However, some of the associations among alcohol drinking premenopausal women were limited to those taking oral contraceptives [40].

(1) Cells that escape from a primary solid tumor invade into the surrounding normal tissue by passing through the basement membrane and extracellular matrix (ECM). Several factors are involved in the invasion process, including the ability to activate enzymes called matrix metalloproteinases (MMP), which are important for the tumor cells to degrade basement membranes and underlying stroma. (2) The escaped cells reach the blood either directly by actively passing through endothelial cells that line the blood vessels or passively through the lymphatic system, which ultimately carries the tumor cells to the blood.

Other researchers investigated the effects of alcohol on metastasis of the estrogen receptor–negative and natural killer (NK) cell-sensitive rat MADB106 mammary adenocarcinoma (Yirmiya et al. 1992). In this study, male Fischer 344 rats were administered only one alcohol dose (1.5 to 3.5 g ethanol/kg body weight into the peritoneal cavity) 1 hour before intravenous tumor inoculation. The higher ethanol doses (i.e., 2.5 g/kg and 3.5 g/kg) significantly increased the number of lung metastases, whereas the lowest dose (1.5 g/kg) did not. Administration of naltrexone, an opioid receptor antagonist used to treat alcohol dependence, did not modify the alcohol-related increase in metastasis. Thus, in a related study these researchers found that administration of 2.5 g/kg ethanol 24 hours before or after tumor inoculation did not affect lung metastasis (Ben-Eliyahu et al. 1996). Yirmiya and colleagues (1992) also administered ethanol in a liquid diet for 2 weeks before and 3 weeks after tumor inoculation and found that lung metastases were increased.

Drinking Alcohol, Often Heavily, Common among People with Cancer and Long-Term Survivors

The author suggested that the decreased antigen-specific antibody production in the cancer patients could be related to upregulation of suppressive cells in these patients (Wustrow 1991). Approximately 4% of cancers worldwide are caused by alcohol consumption, equating to more than 740,000 cases of cancer globally in 2020 [1]. The impact of alcohol consumption on cancer burden differs by cancer type, and cancers of the oesophagus, liver, and breast represent the most alcohol-attributable cases of cancer globally (Figure 1). Drinking alcohol even at lower levels of intake can increase the risk of cancer and we previously estimated that over 100,000 cases of cancer in 2020 were caused by light and moderate drinking of the equivalent of around one or two alcoholic drinks per day [1]. Despite this, there is low public awareness of the causal link between alcohol and cancer and alcohol use is growing in several regions of the world [2,3]. The effects of chronic alcohol consumption on tumor growth and metastasis of the highly invasive and spontaneously metastatic B16BL6 melanoma inoculated subcutaneously were studied in female C57BL/6 mice administered ethanol in drinking water.

A related study using the same alcohol-feeding regimen confirmed alcohol’s effects on growth and angiogenesis of E0771 inoculated into other female C57BL/6 mice (Lu et al. 2014). In that study, a molecule that can inhibit VEGF receptor 2 blocked alcohol’s stimulatory effect on tumor growth, indicating that alcohol acts via a VEGF pathway. 3Interestingly, the same cell type was decreased in the peripheral blood in the cancer patients compared kidney cleanse: does it work 2-day plan and risks with control patients. 2The exception to this is a study in Russia indicating an inverse association between alcohol consumption and mortality (Zaridze et al. 2009). All participants provided written informed consent to share EHRs, surveys, and other study data with qualified investigators for broad-based research. This study followed the Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (STROBE) reporting guideline.

An MR analysis by Ong and colleagues found no significant increase in breast cancer risk per genetically predicted drink per day (odds ratio 1.00 (95% CI 0.93–1.08)) [19]. One early study (Capel et al. 1978) investigated the effect of alcohol exposure on the growth and metastasis of Lewis lung carcinoma. Male animals from a type of mouse strain called C57BL/6 were exposed to 10 percent ethanol in their drinking water for 2, 4, 5, or 8 weeks before tumor cells were implanted into their thighs. Furthermore, metastases were significantly reduced in the 2-week and 8-week ethanol groups but not in the 4-week and 5-week groups. Administration of ethanol for 2 weeks after tumor inoculation affected neither tumor growth nor metastasis.

Hepatocellular Carcinoma

The first mutation is a loss-of-function mutation in the gene for the enzyme aldehyde dehydrogenase 2 (ALDH2). More research is needed to understand some of the disparities seen in this study, such as with age, Dr. LoConte said. Community strategies can help communities create environments that reduce excessive alcohol use. That said, Dr. DuVall continued, high alcohol use in AYAs who have or had cancer is not necessarily surprising. 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.

9. Liver Cirrhosis

The World Health Organization estimates that harmful alcohol use accounts for 5.1% of the global burden of disease and injury worldwide, and results in three million deaths each year. Previous studies have identified links between a person’s socioeconomic status and alcohol use, but currently it is unclear how an individual’s social class impacts their future risk of acquiring alcohol-related medical conditions, like alcoholic liver disease. 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.

Alcohol and cancer: Identifying evidence gaps and research challenges across the cancer continuum

“A lot of our surveys just estimate the total number of drinks per week and haven’t differentiated between the person who has one drink a day each week and someone who has 7 drinks just one day a week,” he said. Overall, eastern Asia and central and eastern Europe had the highest proportions of cancer cases attributed to alcohol consumption, and northern Africa and western Asia had the lowest. Trends for women differed slightly, with the highest proportions of cancer cases attributed to alcohol consumption found in central, eastern, and western Europe; Australia; and New Zealand. 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. Overall, very few studies have addressed the role of and interaction among alcohol, cancer, and the immune system once the cancer is established. It is important to understand these interactions, however, because many alcoholics have immune deficiencies and because a competent immune system is important to the success of many conventional drug therapies for cancer.