This is from the Los Angeles Times, 11-2-11:
Light Drinking Tied to Breast Cancer Risk
Drinking as few as 3 to 6 glasses of wine a week may increase a woman's lifetime risk of breast cancer by 15%, according to an analysis by Harvard University researchers.
The study, published in the Nov. 1, 2011 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, reaffirms that heavy alcohol use raises breast cancer risk, and it adds that light drinking matters too.
"Alcohol is a real risk factor and the more you drink the higher your risk," said Dr. Steven A Narod, a professor and breast cancer researcher at the University of Toronto who wrote a commentary accompaying the study.
On average, a U.S. woman's baseline risk of breast cancer is 1 in 8 over her lifetime, according to the American Cancer Society. The 15% increased risk that was linked to cosumption of 5 to 9.9 grams of alcohol a day is modest, similar to the heightened risk assocaited with using estrogen-progesterone hormone therapy to treat symptoms of menopause. But it's far smaller than the fivefold increased risk that comes from inheriting certain mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes.
The breast cancer findings were based on data from 105,986 women in the long-running Nurses Health Study. Participants were assessed at regular intervals from 1980 to 2008 to record alcohol intake and cases of invasive breast cancer, among other things.
The study does not prove that alcohol consumption makes women more susceptible to breast cancer. But the researchers were able to isolate the link between drinking and breast cancer by controlling for a host of other risk factors, such as family history of the disease and age at first pregnancy.
As in previous studies, the analysis found that women who consumed at least 30 grams of alcohol a day--about 2 drinks--were 51% more likely to develop breast cancer than women who didn't drink at all. But for the first time, researchers were able to see that the risk of breast cancer begins to rise with even modest alcohol intake.
"When you look at this, you see a dose-response effect," said Dr. Wendy Y. Chen, the lead author of the paper and an assistant professor of medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston. "That strengthens the fact that what you're finding is real."
Chen and her colleagues also demonstrated that binge drinking, defined as 6 or more drinks in one sitting, was associated with a 33% increase in cancer risk independent of total alcohol intake over time and that alcohol consumption between the ages of 18 and 40 was linked with higher breast cancer risk later in life no matter what a woman's drinking habits were after age 40.
The study focused only on alcohol's effect on cancer-free women.
Hormones probably play a key role in the alcohol-breast cancer relationship, Chen said, because alcohol intake increases levels of estrogen, which is known to fuel breast cancer growth. --by Shari Roan
Comment: The article also noted that modest alcohol consumption has been identified with heart health and women must choose what they consider more important. We know that there are safer ways to prevent heart disease. I say a word to the wise is sufficient.
Suzanne
