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Cancer risks increase with alcohol use, leading to over 740k cases last year

198 points by sam345 5y ago

qqtt 5y ago
See also: https://www.forbes.com/sites/elvaramirez/2021/06/01/study-no-amount-of-drinking-alcohol-is-safe-for-brain-health/?sh=4bcc91677eaa https://www.forbes.com/sites/elvaramirez/2021/06/01/study-no...
- lovecg 5y ago
  Yep. The old meme that “moderate drinking is better than no drinking at all” needs to die: these studies included people who didn’t drink for medical reasons, skewing the average health of the nondrinking cohort down.
  - synquid 5y ago
    https://www.jacc.org/doi/10.1016/j.jacc.2017.06.054 https://www.jacc.org/doi/10.1016/j.jacc.2017.06.054 What do you make of studies such as this? Their baseline was strictly lifetime abstainers, absolutely no people who stopped drinking for medical reasons. Still, moderate drinking results in lower all-cause mortality.
    - scotty79 5y ago
      It might be that people with worse health tend to abstain from alcohol more often because they feel worse after consuming it. Or that some substances consumed with alcohol, like all other compounds present in wine except for alcohol might have some protective function when consumed regularly. There are way more possible explanations better than "some amount of ethyl alcohol is actually a little bit beneficial".
      - inciampati 5y ago
        Ethyl alcohol may cause harm to the body, but these findings do suggest that the total effect on health is positive. Interestingly, (wrt. https://www.jacc.org/doi/10.1016/j.jacc.2017.06.054 https://www.jacc.org/doi/10.1016/j.jacc.2017.06.054) the 15 drink-a-week threshold that's often quoted as a kind of limit to safe drinking puts your all-cause-mortality risk right at that of lifetime teetotalers. The utilitarian implication is that, after 15 drinks a week, you really are causing harm relative to not drinking at all. So its costs outweigh any benefits. But that implies that there are benefits. These may be very subtle. Perhaps alcohol is part of a balanced diet. It arises during digestion. You find it in ripe fruit, a significant part of many primate diets. It also appears to be part of the typical diet in many of the regions of the world that have the highest life expectancy. Would they live even longer if they could shake the habit? Maybe we could study that genetically. Are these cultures just healthier for other reasons, and thus more tolerant of alcohol? It would be like the entire society has shifted along the curve shown here https://www.jacc.org/cms/asset/f6fb55ac-3d9d-4e40-8128-ec7859e1c29a/fx1.jpg https://www.jacc.org/cms/asset/f6fb55ac-3d9d-4e40-8128-ec785....
    - lovecg 5y ago
      It’s certainly interesting. My initial reaction is that “lifetime abstainers” is still a sufficiently distinct group from the continuum of moderate to heavy drinkers so there might be other confounders. I wonder if a study like that exists? I personally know only a handful of people who never drink, and it’s either for religious reasons or, in one case, the person just likes to put themselves at odds with society in various ways, including never drinking.
avalys 5y ago
740,000 cases out of 7.8 billion people, or less than 1 case per 7,800 people. That’s not all that surprising to me.
- benatkin 5y ago
  That's just in one year, and a lot of people don't drink at all. So it's still pretty high.
  - Gibbon1 5y ago
    Yeah about 2/3 either don't drink or drink very rarely.
    - scotty79 5y ago
      Really? I'm surprised it's such high fraction. I always imagined nearly everybody drinks and very occasional drinkers like me and non-drinkers are a minority.
      - messe 5y ago
        Highly dependent on country/region/state I'd imagine.
- flunhat 5y ago
  From the paper, > Globally, an estimated 741 300 (95% UI 558 500–951 200), or 4.1% (3.1–5.3), of all new cases of cancer in 2020 were attributable to alcohol consumption. Males accounted for 568 700 (76.7%; 95% UI 422 500–731 100) of total alcohol-attributable cancer cases, and cancers of the oesophagus (189 700 cases [110 900–274 600]), liver (154 700 cases [43 700–281 500]), and breast (98 300 cases [68 200–130 500]) contributed the most cases. So ~4 out of 100 cancer cases can be attributed to alcohol consumption. I'm not sure if that's a _ton_ or how to contextualize it, but that seems like the more appropriate framing.
  - brador 5y ago
DantesKite 5y ago
Makes sense. I once read if humans were biologically immortal, everyone would basically get cancer if they lived to be 2,000 years old. It's just inevitable. Hopefully it comes later in life, rather than sooner.
- Google234 5y ago
  I think it would happen way faster than that.
- foolfoolz 5y ago
  if you talk to an oncologist they will phrase it differently. that everyone has cancer in them but not all of it is actively threatening
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  If humans were biologically immortal, they would likely have immune systems strong enough that cancer would be rare. Species such as whales and elephants, who have a lot more cells than humans do, have much stronger anti-cancer mechanisms than humans and rarely get cancer. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/08/elephants-rarely-get-cancer-thanks-zombie-gene https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/08/elephants-rarely-get... https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/325178 https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/325178
  - andi999 5y ago
    People with Laron syndrome don't seem to get cancer.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  Wouldn’t heart disease or strokes just get them?
- Falkon1313 5y ago
  Yeah, cells have to replicate. And whenever they do, there's a chance of mutation. And whenever that happens, there's a chance it will be malignant. Multiply up enough of those chances over time, and the limit approaches a 100% chance. It's almost surprising that so few people die of cancer. Of course, it's always happening, and our bodies are fighting it off all the time. But each time they try, there's a chance that it won't be effective. So it still over time approaches 100%, if something else doesn't get you first.
armada651 5y ago
> Our study highlights the contribution of even relatively low levels of alcohol to the risk of new cancer cases, "relatively" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. I'm always amazed when filling out health surveys where it considers one alcoholic drink every single day a "low level".
- hrh 5y ago
  Had friends that had to have 4-6 beers to chill out every night and had been doing that for 20 years. I feel fucking terrible the day after drinking a six-pack; I can't imagine what that does to the body (a lot of the same stuff as sugar). You're slowly killing yourself. Having not known a grandfather due to alcoholism (don't be so hard on the boomers, their fuckups are the fuckups of a generation that went through ww2), and slowly realized why my father is the way he is....it's kind of fucking terrifying. I don't recall if this was precovid or postcovid, but there was a 60 minutes where they were talking about the impact that understanding the genome has had on health research, but specifically curing some cancers and longevity. They had a harvard prof on there that firmly believed that within 7 years that we'll be seeing real advances (that the public will have access to) on that. 7 years is nothing. You know it's not going to take 7 years, it's going to take 25, but stop pickling yourselves so you can make it that far. I have 45 year old friends that act like they are going to die tomorrow. edit: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/harvard-geneticist-george-church-goal-to-protect-humans-from-viruses-genetic-diseases-and-aging-60-minutes-2019-12-08/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/harvard-geneticist-george-churc... This is the 60 minutes in question. Keep in mind academic timelines. It's longer than seven years, money quote, among other interesting stuff: > Scott Pelley: What's the time horizon on age reversal in humans? George Church: That's in clinical trials right now in dogs. And so, that veterinary product might be a couple years away and then that takes another ten years to get through the human clinical trials.
  - jbigelow76 5y ago
    (don't be so hard on the boomers, their fuckups are the fuckups of a generation that went through ww2) Pretty sure the boomers are the ones that came after WW2, the aforementioned "boom" of their namesake being progeny of those that didn't die during the blitz, Normandy, Stalingrad, and everywhere in between.
DoreenMichele 5y ago
Correlation =/= Causation Since we mostly don't really understand what cancer actually is, it's a bit of a stretch to break down percent supposedly caused by alcohol. I can readily think of other possible reasons for a correlation.
- rafaelero 5y ago
  Let's also smoke, then.
  - DoreenMichele 5y ago
    Only if you are self-treating depression. Though these days there are drugs for depression that can dramatically increase the odds you will quit smoking.
    - rafaelero 5y ago
      This is not where I was heading at. We have no simple way to assert that smoking causes lung cancer: no RCT is available for that. So we are left with the same level of evidence that we have for alcohol, which is observational studies. That knee jerk reaction that observational studies can't give us a relatively high level of confidence is why I mentioned the case of tobacco: if you really believe that, you should also disdain the case against smoking.
      - DoreenMichele 5y ago
        I really believe that we don't fully understand what cancer is. I really believe that after taking care of a loved one post mastectomy. I really believe that after listening to a relative who worked at the CDC and had cancer multiple times bitch about how most studies are bullshit and there's very little new in cancer research. I really believe that after another relative of mine caused two cancer clinics to change their practices. I really believe that after listening to the tales of a relative be patient zero in a cancer study. And on and on. Cancer runs rampant in my family. I've had multiple relatives who have had it, some multiple times. Your opinions about my opinions not withstanding, I will continue to believe what makes sense to me.
_huayra_ 5y ago
I remember how there was that study about how "alcohol is good for you" because the "mortality vs. alcohol consumption" was a slight bathtub curve at the low end. They completely forgot that many people who don't drink do so because of other confounding health complications that may increase mortality. Talk about not controlling for variables, yeesh :|
refurb 5y ago
My sister works as a nurse in a geriatric department her attitude is “if I make it to 70 I’m going to start smoking”. She’s seen plenty of people with healthy bodies and destroyed minds to know she’s rather avoid that kind of fate.
- synquid 5y ago
  Lowering your expected lifetime probably also lowers your expected time until disease.
  - refurb 5y ago
    I think the trade she was making was substituting a quicker death at a younger age versus a longer death at an older age.
- machinehermiter 5y ago
  65-70 is my age for this. No kids/grandkids for me so I don't see much value in old age. I have to live now and only have 15-20 good years left. Once that time comes it is time to party. Cigars, weed and rum. A broken down physical body with an even more broken down mind is a fate worse than death to me.
  - unixhero 5y ago
    Dude that is a depressing attitude you have to life.
    - jjgreen 5y ago
      Realistic and pragmatic I'd say ...
grouphugs 5y ago
blame it on the alcohol noises these people are fucking retarded
grouphugs 5y ago
this is the epitome of the protestant promise land, gas-lighting with bullshit for white ppl reasons. the more they believe their own bullshit, the more of them that die, and that's not a bad thing
honie 5y ago
- Does the study exclude the possibility of other factors causing the increase in cases in 2020? For example, potential reduction in exercise and exposure to sunlight? - How valid is the assumption "assuming a 10-year latency period between alcohol consumption and cancer diagnosis"? - Why would not one attempt to find correlation between yearly reported cases (or PAF if applicable) and yearly alcohol consumption instead? As it stands, some points in the discussion read like assertions. One example is this: > Our estimated global PAF was lower than the previous global estimates of 5·5% of cancer cases in 2012, 4·8% of cancer deaths in 2016, and 4·9% of cancer deaths in 2019. This difference could be due to genuine decreases in consumption of alcohol in several world regions, such as in southern Europe and central and eastern Europe, as Shield and colleagues reported a 5·5% decrease in the global alcohol-attributable age-standardised rate of death from cancer between 2000 and 2016. And this: > On the other end of the spectrum, alcohol consumption in central and eastern Europe has historically outranked that of other world regions, but has decreased in recent years, whereas increases in alcohol consumption, linked with countries' economic development, are projected in Asian countries such as China and India. The statements above seem to be at odds with each other according to the number of alcohol-attributed cases from each country in the appendix.[2] [1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2045(21)00279-5/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2... [2] https://www.thelancet.com/cms/10.1016/S1470-2045(21)00279-5/attachment/30c7618c-27fa-4cfd-892a-2cea2bc66096/mmc1.pdf https://www.thelancet.com/cms/10.1016/S1470-2045(21)00279-5/... Edit: formatting, removed part of a sentence for a better tone. Edit 2: removed irrelevant part in the second quote.
crackercrews 5y ago
> Even moderate drinking, two or fewer drinks a day, accounted for an estimated 14%, or 103,000 cases, of alcohol-related cancers, according to the study. This is not a helpful statistic because it doesn't say what percent of people are in this category. I skimmed the actual paper [1] and it appears that there is no designation below "moderate drinking" so this literally captures everyone who drinks 2 drinks or less per day. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2045(21)00279-5/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2...
- fauigerzigerk 5y ago
  >This is not a helpful statistic because it doesn't say what percent of people are in this category. Exactly. I came here to ask whether anyone had read the paper carefully enough to say whether this information is actually missing or just absent from the summary. I get the impression that there is a sort of culture war going on. Some seem to be so keen on stressing that there is no safe level of drinking that they avoid saying anything about where the risk curve really starts to bend upward more steeply, which is what most people will want to know.
  - danybittel 5y ago
    Because most peoples main desire is "comfort" and not "truth".
    - eurasiantiger 5y ago
      Orrrrr could it be that there is lots of money in selling booze, and big players don’t want it banned again in favor of less harmful and/or more beneficial substances?
  - taneq 5y ago
    > I get the impression that there is a sort of culture war going on. This is absolutely what's happening. Messaging from some official sources is so ideologically driven that they happily publish wrong and misleading information if they think it will further their goal. The measure has become the target and so ceased to become a good measure.
michaelmrose 5y ago
It is frustrating that they lump in any amount of alcohol up to 2 drinks per day as moderate which honestly isn't all that moderate. Still another way to read that is that while alcohol represents a real risk to community health resources you can mitigate 86% of the risk by limiting yourself to ONLY 68 gallons (257 liters) of beer this year. I would not be terribly surprised if most of the issues with moderate drinkers concerned users were on the heavy side of "moderate"
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- fuzxi 5y ago
  The number I see frequently as the threshold of "heavy drinking" is 15 drinks per week, so I certainly agree that it's not accurate to call 14 drinks per week "moderate". 15 drinks per week is actually the limit here for commercial drivers. If you admit to drinking more than that during your annual/semi-annual DMV physical, you have essentially just admitted to alcoholism and can't keep driving class A/B vehicles unless you enter a substance abuse program.
  - jsbdk 5y ago
    That limit wouldn't work in many countries.
    - eurasiantiger 5y ago
      Because those countries are either under the fiscal control of Big Booze (taxes), or they are under control of criminal enterprises (usually from neighboring country)
      - taurath 5y ago
        Or the culture is such that people regularly use alcohol both for pleasure and to avoid their emotional issues. Real men don’t have emotions, and if you’re feeling them then it’s better to knock back a few glasses then to express them.
2Gkashmiri 5y ago
geesh. how about doing a generalized survey similar to this on a country level, like there are "muslim majority" countries where alcohol is either banned or is present to a level that it doesnt matter. do those countries see less cancers than say france or any european country or the usa which does have an extensive alcohol use?
- cpursley 5y ago
  It's mentioned in the post; I suggest reading it first.
IndySun 5y ago
Switch it. Are people, on average, who have never drank alcohol living longer and healthier lives than even those on the lowest level of consumption? This is far more relevant and the answer is likely to be 'depends' due to an average human life being a colossal confluence of many 'stuff'. This 'average' reporting can be dangerously misleading.
mjfl 5y ago
Alcohol is metabolized into aldehydes which cross link your DNA, literally preserving you as you are alive. It is a biological miracle that your body has DNA repair enzymes which can basically shrug this off. If we didn't have those enzymes drinking alcohol would lead to similar symptoms as radiation poisoning.
- darkerside 5y ago
  Biological miracle is a stretch. We wouldn't drink it if it were poison. It's just an interesting mechanism.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    Alternatively, our entire bodies are 'biological miracles' and nothing specific is remarkable.
- makomk 5y ago
  More like a biological necessity. There seems to be no shortage of fairly nasty chemicals produced by common biochemical processes that our bodies just had to evolve ways to seal with.
- sumedh 5y ago
  > It is a biological miracle that your body has DNA repair enzymes Maybe our ancestors who did not have this repair enzymes died while those people whose body mutated to make this enzyme survived?
  - rambojazz 5y ago
    You just described evolution.
skincancer1012 5y ago
The best cure for any cancer is an early diagnosis. And it does not matter whether you drink, eat only fatty foods or burn in the sun. Take care of your health, always ask for a second opinion from other doctors and do not get sick! There are hundreds of causes of cancer. You can be a teetotaler, a vegan, there are no cancer patients in the family, and you can still die from it. Such a study, in my opinion, once again shows that collecting statistics is good, but you still need to be able to analyze it correctly. Millions of people who drink do not get cancer, but they easily die from cirrhosis, which is not cancer in any way. Conversely, millions of people who do not drink or drink a couple of glasses of beer once a month die of cancer.
hermitsings 5y ago
like duh
shoto_io 5y ago
Many of my friends doubled down on their alcohol use during the pandemic. This might be another side effect of lockdowns that will kill people and simply be ignored by decision makers.
- op00to 5y ago
  Funny. I stopped drinking altogether during the pandemic. It was too hard to get alcohol in the early months, and I just stopped drinking. Pre pandemic my wife and I would have a beer or glass of wine every night, maybe another one while cooking. Always when out with friends. Now, I may only have 2-3 drinks a month. Our drinking wasn’t problematic but I absolutely notice improvements in my health - I don’t feel like shit in the mornings. Thanks Covid!
  - lm28469 5y ago
    Same here, and starting to go out again made it painfully obvious that a lot of what people call "night life" is actually getting (mildly to heavily) impaired to enjoy activities that aren't enjoyable without the impairment
    - op00to 5y ago
      I just play with my ham radios now. It’s probably healthier than drinking.
dynm 5y ago
Many people are not aware of the huge range of health issues that alcohol is associated with. It goes way beyond just cancer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_and_health#/media/File:Health_risks_of_alcohol_consumption.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_and_health#/media/File...
- TaupeRanger 5y ago
  Most people understand that occasional drinking with a healthy lifestyle is perfectly fine, and drinking 3 beers every day is probably not: https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-healthy-eating/in-depth/alcohol/art-20044551 https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h...
cortic 5y ago
The abundance of pseudo scientific studies that; Confuse correlation with causation. Fail to control for anything to get an interesting conclusion. Or just exaggerate the results. Has left me to instinctively assume, just from the title that either; Cancer causes alcohol use. Alcohol use causes smoking. Or their sampling groups is in a cancer ward. I'm not saying this is a bad study, or article. I'm just commenting on the sheer amount of crap circulating is leading to a general skepticism that seems to be filtering out people like me from even clicking the title/link to these studies.
- EugeneOZ 5y ago
  Causation, from the article: > Ethanol, the form of alcohol present in beer, wine and liquor, breaks down to form a known carcinogen called acetaldehyde, which damages DNA and interferes with cells' ability to repair the damage. > Alcohol can also increase levels of hormones, including estrogen. Hormones signal cells to grow and divide. With more cell division, there are more opportunities for cancer to develop. Alcohol also reduces the body's ability to absorb certain cancer-protective nutrients, including vitamins A, C, D, E and folate.
  - cortic 5y ago
    Thanks. But I think you missed my point, and my second paragraph. But if you think there is an overabundance of accuracy in scientific reporting then perhaps we frequent different places.
    - bagacrap 5y ago
      so you point is that other, bad studies cause you to ignore good studies such as this one? Strange attitude to hold even while being aware of it
TaupeRanger 5y ago
This is complete bunk, like most nutrition epidemiological studies. They start by assuming a causal relationship that we simply don't know actually exists, using biologically "plausible" pathways that are, again, unproven. And even then, they don't seem to account for the reduction of cancer risk that many wine and beer studies have shown (though, again, from equally spurious epi studies). And here again we have news outlets just uncritically parroting the findings to their audiences.
- RandomWorker 5y ago
  The title is wrong here Of the 740k is global not USA. And it represents 4% of all cases. Which is relatively low but not insignificant. I don’t think they are wrong, anecdotal evidence from my family also explains this, the family members who drink quite a lot more than 2 cups a day, they all have colon cancer in my family. Strangely those that do not drink have kept it at bay or at least got it 10/20 years later.
- ImaCake 5y ago
  >They start by assuming a causal relationship that we simply don't know actually exists They assume this causal relationship based on decades of randomised controlled trials (the only ethical way to get this information in humans). Their estimate for the risk of cancer based on alcohol consumption comes from previous work which would have carefully summarised the data from these trials and conservatively estimated the risk. As for the counter that alcohol may reduce cancer risk. Sure, that is true. You can also demonstrate that sunscreen causes cancer. But does the increased cancer risk from sunscreen outweigh the risk of getting too much sun exposure? Probably not (keep wearing sunscreen!). It is easy to imagine a similar equation for alcohol.
  - maxerickson 5y ago
    There are people that drink what the study says to drink, every day? What else would 'controlled' mean in this context?
    - 5y ago
ImaCake 5y ago
There's a lot of people dismmising this study. But I don't think people realise how much history and scholarship is going into this. I am not a cancer biologist, so neither do I. But I can provide a little bit of insight so that people at least know what they are trying to reject. The data for this study comes from the GLOBOCAN database, which seems to be an aggregator of cancer data [0]. This database must be massive in it's scale. The abstract states an estimated 750,000 cases attributable to alcohol consumption. That's a lot of people. But the actual data they are using contains several million participants at a minimum! You can take a look at some of the numbers here [1]. "19.3 million cases and 10 million cancer deaths in 2020" are huge numbers, even if they are staying with just 2020 registered cancer cases. How do they get these numbers? It looks like they have aggregated together cancer registries from multiple countries. Some of these will be super accurate (e.g Nordic countries, New Zealand etc) and some more sparse and less complete. The estimates of cancer risk come from about the most authoritative scholary source possible today: "World Cancer Research Fund International’s Continuous Update Project" which appears to be a kind of set of mega systematic reviews on the links between diet/nutrition/exerice on cancer risk. This project has massive amounts of scholarship, data, and experience behind it [2]. You may think the paper is still crap. But maybe think for a moment before rejecting it out of hand. This isn't a single biased study of 30 white college students at Harvard. This is a model based on data from whole nation's cancer registries combined with parameters estimated from the best, hopefully least biased, human trial studies we can manage with the resources available to us. 0. https://www.uicc.org/who-we-are/about-us https://www.uicc.org/who-we-are/about-us 1. https://www.uicc.org/news/globocan-2020-new-global-cancer-data https://www.uicc.org/news/globocan-2020-new-global-cancer-da... 2. https://www.wcrf.org/dietandcancer/a-summary-of-the-third-expert-report/ https://www.wcrf.org/dietandcancer/a-summary-of-the-third-ex...
kaminar 5y ago
Plot twist: all those "cases" were really Covid. Nobody is allowed to have any other disease. As you were.
kaminar 5y ago
Most of you only know your peer group, who are also nerds with jobs. The vast majority of weed smokers are serious drug addicts who do it all day, search for it all day and are also into heavier drugs...besides multiple trips to jail, kids they don't want, families who are either drug addicts or have severed ties due to the damage caused...and finally they lead a severely unhealthy life they hate. You stupid, self righteous hippie wannabes.
xyzzy21 5y ago
Without quantifying the specific amounts of consumption attributable to these deaths, it's pretty meaningless as a statistic. As presented it literally makes claim sound like a wide-eyes, self-righteous temperance fanatic claiming liquor will "send you to hell!" Not much on science and more on religious fervor! We went down the road once before and it made things worse.
archagon 5y ago
If anyone is interested in reducing their alcohol intake, I developed a free and open source iOS app called Good Spirits that lets you set your weekly alcohol quota and syncs down check-ins from Untappd: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/good-spirits/id1434237439 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/good-spirits/id1434237439 The repo is here: https://github.com/archagon/good-spirits https://github.com/archagon/good-spirits I've set the default to 10 standard (US) drinks per week for men, which (at the time the app was developed) seemed to be the upper bound for low-ish risk drinking as established by a large number of health ministries around the world. (Obviously, it's best to drink as little as possible, but I made this app with myself as the target audience: a craft beer enthusiast who doesn't want to get too carried away.)
amanaplanacanal 5y ago
Unfortunately this breathless reporting makes it impossible to determine the actual risk. On average, how much of my lifespan am I losing by drinking? If it's several years, I might decide it's not worth it. If it's several days, I'm not sure I care that much. Is the data available to calculate this?

198 points by sam345 5y ago

qqtt 5y ago

See also: https://www.forbes.com/sites/elvaramirez/2021/06/01/study-no-amount-of-drinking-alcohol-is-safe-for-brain-health/?sh=4bcc91677eaa https://www.forbes.com/sites/elvaramirez/2021/06/01/study-no...

lovecg 5y ago
Yep. The old meme that “moderate drinking is better than no drinking at all” needs to die: these studies included people who didn’t drink for medical reasons, skewing the average health of the nondrinking cohort down.
- synquid 5y ago
  https://www.jacc.org/doi/10.1016/j.jacc.2017.06.054 https://www.jacc.org/doi/10.1016/j.jacc.2017.06.054 What do you make of studies such as this? Their baseline was strictly lifetime abstainers, absolutely no people who stopped drinking for medical reasons. Still, moderate drinking results in lower all-cause mortality.
  - scotty79 5y ago
    It might be that people with worse health tend to abstain from alcohol more often because they feel worse after consuming it. Or that some substances consumed with alcohol, like all other compounds present in wine except for alcohol might have some protective function when consumed regularly. There are way more possible explanations better than "some amount of ethyl alcohol is actually a little bit beneficial".
    - inciampati 5y ago
      Ethyl alcohol may cause harm to the body, but these findings do suggest that the total effect on health is positive. Interestingly, (wrt. https://www.jacc.org/doi/10.1016/j.jacc.2017.06.054 https://www.jacc.org/doi/10.1016/j.jacc.2017.06.054) the 15 drink-a-week threshold that's often quoted as a kind of limit to safe drinking puts your all-cause-mortality risk right at that of lifetime teetotalers. The utilitarian implication is that, after 15 drinks a week, you really are causing harm relative to not drinking at all. So its costs outweigh any benefits. But that implies that there are benefits. These may be very subtle. Perhaps alcohol is part of a balanced diet. It arises during digestion. You find it in ripe fruit, a significant part of many primate diets. It also appears to be part of the typical diet in many of the regions of the world that have the highest life expectancy. Would they live even longer if they could shake the habit? Maybe we could study that genetically. Are these cultures just healthier for other reasons, and thus more tolerant of alcohol? It would be like the entire society has shifted along the curve shown here https://www.jacc.org/cms/asset/f6fb55ac-3d9d-4e40-8128-ec7859e1c29a/fx1.jpg https://www.jacc.org/cms/asset/f6fb55ac-3d9d-4e40-8128-ec785....
  - lovecg 5y ago
    It’s certainly interesting. My initial reaction is that “lifetime abstainers” is still a sufficiently distinct group from the continuum of moderate to heavy drinkers so there might be other confounders. I wonder if a study like that exists? I personally know only a handful of people who never drink, and it’s either for religious reasons or, in one case, the person just likes to put themselves at odds with society in various ways, including never drinking.

avalys 5y ago

740,000 cases out of 7.8 billion people, or less than 1 case per 7,800 people. That’s not all that surprising to me.

benatkin 5y ago
That's just in one year, and a lot of people don't drink at all. So it's still pretty high.
- Gibbon1 5y ago
  Yeah about 2/3 either don't drink or drink very rarely.
  - scotty79 5y ago
    Really? I'm surprised it's such high fraction. I always imagined nearly everybody drinks and very occasional drinkers like me and non-drinkers are a minority.
    - messe 5y ago
      Highly dependent on country/region/state I'd imagine.
flunhat 5y ago
From the paper, > Globally, an estimated 741 300 (95% UI 558 500–951 200), or 4.1% (3.1–5.3), of all new cases of cancer in 2020 were attributable to alcohol consumption. Males accounted for 568 700 (76.7%; 95% UI 422 500–731 100) of total alcohol-attributable cancer cases, and cancers of the oesophagus (189 700 cases [110 900–274 600]), liver (154 700 cases [43 700–281 500]), and breast (98 300 cases [68 200–130 500]) contributed the most cases. So ~4 out of 100 cancer cases can be attributed to alcohol consumption. I'm not sure if that's a _ton_ or how to contextualize it, but that seems like the more appropriate framing.
- brador 5y ago

DantesKite 5y ago

Makes sense. I once read if humans were biologically immortal, everyone would basically get cancer if they lived to be 2,000 years old. It's just inevitable. Hopefully it comes later in life, rather than sooner.

Google234 5y ago
I think it would happen way faster than that.
foolfoolz 5y ago
if you talk to an oncologist they will phrase it differently. that everyone has cancer in them but not all of it is actively threatening
inglor_cz 5y ago
If humans were biologically immortal, they would likely have immune systems strong enough that cancer would be rare. Species such as whales and elephants, who have a lot more cells than humans do, have much stronger anti-cancer mechanisms than humans and rarely get cancer. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/08/elephants-rarely-get-cancer-thanks-zombie-gene https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/08/elephants-rarely-get... https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/325178 https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/325178
- andi999 5y ago
  People with Laron syndrome don't seem to get cancer.
Apocryphon 5y ago
Wouldn’t heart disease or strokes just get them?
Falkon1313 5y ago
Yeah, cells have to replicate. And whenever they do, there's a chance of mutation. And whenever that happens, there's a chance it will be malignant. Multiply up enough of those chances over time, and the limit approaches a 100% chance. It's almost surprising that so few people die of cancer. Of course, it's always happening, and our bodies are fighting it off all the time. But each time they try, there's a chance that it won't be effective. So it still over time approaches 100%, if something else doesn't get you first.

armada651 5y ago

> Our study highlights the contribution of even relatively low levels of alcohol to the risk of new cancer cases, "relatively" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. I'm always amazed when filling out health surveys where it considers one alcoholic drink every single day a "low level".

hrh 5y ago
Had friends that had to have 4-6 beers to chill out every night and had been doing that for 20 years. I feel fucking terrible the day after drinking a six-pack; I can't imagine what that does to the body (a lot of the same stuff as sugar). You're slowly killing yourself. Having not known a grandfather due to alcoholism (don't be so hard on the boomers, their fuckups are the fuckups of a generation that went through ww2), and slowly realized why my father is the way he is....it's kind of fucking terrifying. I don't recall if this was precovid or postcovid, but there was a 60 minutes where they were talking about the impact that understanding the genome has had on health research, but specifically curing some cancers and longevity. They had a harvard prof on there that firmly believed that within 7 years that we'll be seeing real advances (that the public will have access to) on that. 7 years is nothing. You know it's not going to take 7 years, it's going to take 25, but stop pickling yourselves so you can make it that far. I have 45 year old friends that act like they are going to die tomorrow. edit: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/harvard-geneticist-george-church-goal-to-protect-humans-from-viruses-genetic-diseases-and-aging-60-minutes-2019-12-08/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/harvard-geneticist-george-churc... This is the 60 minutes in question. Keep in mind academic timelines. It's longer than seven years, money quote, among other interesting stuff: > Scott Pelley: What's the time horizon on age reversal in humans? George Church: That's in clinical trials right now in dogs. And so, that veterinary product might be a couple years away and then that takes another ten years to get through the human clinical trials.
- jbigelow76 5y ago
  (don't be so hard on the boomers, their fuckups are the fuckups of a generation that went through ww2) Pretty sure the boomers are the ones that came after WW2, the aforementioned "boom" of their namesake being progeny of those that didn't die during the blitz, Normandy, Stalingrad, and everywhere in between.

DoreenMichele 5y ago

Correlation =/= Causation Since we mostly don't really understand what cancer actually is, it's a bit of a stretch to break down percent supposedly caused by alcohol. I can readily think of other possible reasons for a correlation.

rafaelero 5y ago
Let's also smoke, then.
- DoreenMichele 5y ago
  Only if you are self-treating depression. Though these days there are drugs for depression that can dramatically increase the odds you will quit smoking.
  - rafaelero 5y ago
    This is not where I was heading at. We have no simple way to assert that smoking causes lung cancer: no RCT is available for that. So we are left with the same level of evidence that we have for alcohol, which is observational studies. That knee jerk reaction that observational studies can't give us a relatively high level of confidence is why I mentioned the case of tobacco: if you really believe that, you should also disdain the case against smoking.
    - DoreenMichele 5y ago
      I really believe that we don't fully understand what cancer is. I really believe that after taking care of a loved one post mastectomy. I really believe that after listening to a relative who worked at the CDC and had cancer multiple times bitch about how most studies are bullshit and there's very little new in cancer research. I really believe that after another relative of mine caused two cancer clinics to change their practices. I really believe that after listening to the tales of a relative be patient zero in a cancer study. And on and on. Cancer runs rampant in my family. I've had multiple relatives who have had it, some multiple times. Your opinions about my opinions not withstanding, I will continue to believe what makes sense to me.

_huayra_ 5y ago

I remember how there was that study about how "alcohol is good for you" because the "mortality vs. alcohol consumption" was a slight bathtub curve at the low end. They completely forgot that many people who don't drink do so because of other confounding health complications that may increase mortality. Talk about not controlling for variables, yeesh :|

refurb 5y ago

My sister works as a nurse in a geriatric department her attitude is “if I make it to 70 I’m going to start smoking”. She’s seen plenty of people with healthy bodies and destroyed minds to know she’s rather avoid that kind of fate.

synquid 5y ago
Lowering your expected lifetime probably also lowers your expected time until disease.
- refurb 5y ago
  I think the trade she was making was substituting a quicker death at a younger age versus a longer death at an older age.
machinehermiter 5y ago
65-70 is my age for this. No kids/grandkids for me so I don't see much value in old age. I have to live now and only have 15-20 good years left. Once that time comes it is time to party. Cigars, weed and rum. A broken down physical body with an even more broken down mind is a fate worse than death to me.
- unixhero 5y ago
  Dude that is a depressing attitude you have to life.
  - jjgreen 5y ago
    Realistic and pragmatic I'd say ...

grouphugs 5y ago

blame it on the alcohol noises these people are fucking retarded

grouphugs 5y ago

this is the epitome of the protestant promise land, gas-lighting with bullshit for white ppl reasons. the more they believe their own bullshit, the more of them that die, and that's not a bad thing

honie 5y ago

- Does the study exclude the possibility of other factors causing the increase in cases in 2020? For example, potential reduction in exercise and exposure to sunlight? - How valid is the assumption "assuming a 10-year latency period between alcohol consumption and cancer diagnosis"? - Why would not one attempt to find correlation between yearly reported cases (or PAF if applicable) and yearly alcohol consumption instead? As it stands, some points in the discussion read like assertions. One example is this: > Our estimated global PAF was lower than the previous global estimates of 5·5% of cancer cases in 2012, 4·8% of cancer deaths in 2016, and 4·9% of cancer deaths in 2019. This difference could be due to genuine decreases in consumption of alcohol in several world regions, such as in southern Europe and central and eastern Europe, as Shield and colleagues reported a 5·5% decrease in the global alcohol-attributable age-standardised rate of death from cancer between 2000 and 2016. And this: > On the other end of the spectrum, alcohol consumption in central and eastern Europe has historically outranked that of other world regions, but has decreased in recent years, whereas increases in alcohol consumption, linked with countries' economic development, are projected in Asian countries such as China and India. The statements above seem to be at odds with each other according to the number of alcohol-attributed cases from each country in the appendix.[2] [1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2045(21)00279-5/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2... [2] https://www.thelancet.com/cms/10.1016/S1470-2045(21)00279-5/attachment/30c7618c-27fa-4cfd-892a-2cea2bc66096/mmc1.pdf https://www.thelancet.com/cms/10.1016/S1470-2045(21)00279-5/... Edit: formatting, removed part of a sentence for a better tone. Edit 2: removed irrelevant part in the second quote.

crackercrews 5y ago

> Even moderate drinking, two or fewer drinks a day, accounted for an estimated 14%, or 103,000 cases, of alcohol-related cancers, according to the study. This is not a helpful statistic because it doesn't say what percent of people are in this category. I skimmed the actual paper [1] and it appears that there is no designation below "moderate drinking" so this literally captures everyone who drinks 2 drinks or less per day. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2045(21)00279-5/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2...

fauigerzigerk 5y ago
>This is not a helpful statistic because it doesn't say what percent of people are in this category. Exactly. I came here to ask whether anyone had read the paper carefully enough to say whether this information is actually missing or just absent from the summary. I get the impression that there is a sort of culture war going on. Some seem to be so keen on stressing that there is no safe level of drinking that they avoid saying anything about where the risk curve really starts to bend upward more steeply, which is what most people will want to know.
- danybittel 5y ago
  Because most peoples main desire is "comfort" and not "truth".
  - eurasiantiger 5y ago
    Orrrrr could it be that there is lots of money in selling booze, and big players don’t want it banned again in favor of less harmful and/or more beneficial substances?
- taneq 5y ago
  > I get the impression that there is a sort of culture war going on. This is absolutely what's happening. Messaging from some official sources is so ideologically driven that they happily publish wrong and misleading information if they think it will further their goal. The measure has become the target and so ceased to become a good measure.

michaelmrose 5y ago

It is frustrating that they lump in any amount of alcohol up to 2 drinks per day as moderate which honestly isn't all that moderate. Still another way to read that is that while alcohol represents a real risk to community health resources you can mitigate 86% of the risk by limiting yourself to ONLY 68 gallons (257 liters) of beer this year. I would not be terribly surprised if most of the issues with moderate drinkers concerned users were on the heavy side of "moderate"

deleted 5y ago
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fuzxi 5y ago
The number I see frequently as the threshold of "heavy drinking" is 15 drinks per week, so I certainly agree that it's not accurate to call 14 drinks per week "moderate". 15 drinks per week is actually the limit here for commercial drivers. If you admit to drinking more than that during your annual/semi-annual DMV physical, you have essentially just admitted to alcoholism and can't keep driving class A/B vehicles unless you enter a substance abuse program.
- jsbdk 5y ago
  That limit wouldn't work in many countries.
  - eurasiantiger 5y ago
    Because those countries are either under the fiscal control of Big Booze (taxes), or they are under control of criminal enterprises (usually from neighboring country)
    - taurath 5y ago
      Or the culture is such that people regularly use alcohol both for pleasure and to avoid their emotional issues. Real men don’t have emotions, and if you’re feeling them then it’s better to knock back a few glasses then to express them.

2Gkashmiri 5y ago

geesh. how about doing a generalized survey similar to this on a country level, like there are "muslim majority" countries where alcohol is either banned or is present to a level that it doesnt matter. do those countries see less cancers than say france or any european country or the usa which does have an extensive alcohol use?

cpursley 5y ago
It's mentioned in the post; I suggest reading it first.

IndySun 5y ago

Switch it. Are people, on average, who have never drank alcohol living longer and healthier lives than even those on the lowest level of consumption? This is far more relevant and the answer is likely to be 'depends' due to an average human life being a colossal confluence of many 'stuff'. This 'average' reporting can be dangerously misleading.

mjfl 5y ago

Alcohol is metabolized into aldehydes which cross link your DNA, literally preserving you as you are alive. It is a biological miracle that your body has DNA repair enzymes which can basically shrug this off. If we didn't have those enzymes drinking alcohol would lead to similar symptoms as radiation poisoning.

darkerside 5y ago
Biological miracle is a stretch. We wouldn't drink it if it were poison. It's just an interesting mechanism.
- OJFord 5y ago
  Alternatively, our entire bodies are 'biological miracles' and nothing specific is remarkable.
makomk 5y ago
More like a biological necessity. There seems to be no shortage of fairly nasty chemicals produced by common biochemical processes that our bodies just had to evolve ways to seal with.
sumedh 5y ago
> It is a biological miracle that your body has DNA repair enzymes Maybe our ancestors who did not have this repair enzymes died while those people whose body mutated to make this enzyme survived?
- rambojazz 5y ago
  You just described evolution.

skincancer1012 5y ago

The best cure for any cancer is an early diagnosis. And it does not matter whether you drink, eat only fatty foods or burn in the sun. Take care of your health, always ask for a second opinion from other doctors and do not get sick! There are hundreds of causes of cancer. You can be a teetotaler, a vegan, there are no cancer patients in the family, and you can still die from it. Such a study, in my opinion, once again shows that collecting statistics is good, but you still need to be able to analyze it correctly. Millions of people who drink do not get cancer, but they easily die from cirrhosis, which is not cancer in any way. Conversely, millions of people who do not drink or drink a couple of glasses of beer once a month die of cancer.

hermitsings 5y ago

like duh

shoto_io 5y ago

Many of my friends doubled down on their alcohol use during the pandemic. This might be another side effect of lockdowns that will kill people and simply be ignored by decision makers.

op00to 5y ago
Funny. I stopped drinking altogether during the pandemic. It was too hard to get alcohol in the early months, and I just stopped drinking. Pre pandemic my wife and I would have a beer or glass of wine every night, maybe another one while cooking. Always when out with friends. Now, I may only have 2-3 drinks a month. Our drinking wasn’t problematic but I absolutely notice improvements in my health - I don’t feel like shit in the mornings. Thanks Covid!
- lm28469 5y ago
  Same here, and starting to go out again made it painfully obvious that a lot of what people call "night life" is actually getting (mildly to heavily) impaired to enjoy activities that aren't enjoyable without the impairment
  - op00to 5y ago
    I just play with my ham radios now. It’s probably healthier than drinking.

dynm 5y ago

Many people are not aware of the huge range of health issues that alcohol is associated with. It goes way beyond just cancer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_and_health#/media/File:Health_risks_of_alcohol_consumption.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_and_health#/media/File...

TaupeRanger 5y ago
Most people understand that occasional drinking with a healthy lifestyle is perfectly fine, and drinking 3 beers every day is probably not: https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-healthy-eating/in-depth/alcohol/art-20044551 https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h...

cortic 5y ago

The abundance of pseudo scientific studies that; Confuse correlation with causation. Fail to control for anything to get an interesting conclusion. Or just exaggerate the results. Has left me to instinctively assume, just from the title that either; Cancer causes alcohol use. Alcohol use causes smoking. Or their sampling groups is in a cancer ward. I'm not saying this is a bad study, or article. I'm just commenting on the sheer amount of crap circulating is leading to a general skepticism that seems to be filtering out people like me from even clicking the title/link to these studies.

EugeneOZ 5y ago
Causation, from the article: > Ethanol, the form of alcohol present in beer, wine and liquor, breaks down to form a known carcinogen called acetaldehyde, which damages DNA and interferes with cells' ability to repair the damage. > Alcohol can also increase levels of hormones, including estrogen. Hormones signal cells to grow and divide. With more cell division, there are more opportunities for cancer to develop. Alcohol also reduces the body's ability to absorb certain cancer-protective nutrients, including vitamins A, C, D, E and folate.
- cortic 5y ago
  Thanks. But I think you missed my point, and my second paragraph. But if you think there is an overabundance of accuracy in scientific reporting then perhaps we frequent different places.
  - bagacrap 5y ago
    so you point is that other, bad studies cause you to ignore good studies such as this one? Strange attitude to hold even while being aware of it

TaupeRanger 5y ago

This is complete bunk, like most nutrition epidemiological studies. They start by assuming a causal relationship that we simply don't know actually exists, using biologically "plausible" pathways that are, again, unproven. And even then, they don't seem to account for the reduction of cancer risk that many wine and beer studies have shown (though, again, from equally spurious epi studies). And here again we have news outlets just uncritically parroting the findings to their audiences.

RandomWorker 5y ago
The title is wrong here Of the 740k is global not USA. And it represents 4% of all cases. Which is relatively low but not insignificant. I don’t think they are wrong, anecdotal evidence from my family also explains this, the family members who drink quite a lot more than 2 cups a day, they all have colon cancer in my family. Strangely those that do not drink have kept it at bay or at least got it 10/20 years later.
ImaCake 5y ago
>They start by assuming a causal relationship that we simply don't know actually exists They assume this causal relationship based on decades of randomised controlled trials (the only ethical way to get this information in humans). Their estimate for the risk of cancer based on alcohol consumption comes from previous work which would have carefully summarised the data from these trials and conservatively estimated the risk. As for the counter that alcohol may reduce cancer risk. Sure, that is true. You can also demonstrate that sunscreen causes cancer. But does the increased cancer risk from sunscreen outweigh the risk of getting too much sun exposure? Probably not (keep wearing sunscreen!). It is easy to imagine a similar equation for alcohol.
- maxerickson 5y ago
  There are people that drink what the study says to drink, every day? What else would 'controlled' mean in this context?
  - 5y ago

ImaCake 5y ago

There's a lot of people dismmising this study. But I don't think people realise how much history and scholarship is going into this. I am not a cancer biologist, so neither do I. But I can provide a little bit of insight so that people at least know what they are trying to reject. The data for this study comes from the GLOBOCAN database, which seems to be an aggregator of cancer data [0]. This database must be massive in it's scale. The abstract states an estimated 750,000 cases attributable to alcohol consumption. That's a lot of people. But the actual data they are using contains several million participants at a minimum! You can take a look at some of the numbers here [1]. "19.3 million cases and 10 million cancer deaths in 2020" are huge numbers, even if they are staying with just 2020 registered cancer cases. How do they get these numbers? It looks like they have aggregated together cancer registries from multiple countries. Some of these will be super accurate (e.g Nordic countries, New Zealand etc) and some more sparse and less complete. The estimates of cancer risk come from about the most authoritative scholary source possible today: "World Cancer Research Fund International’s Continuous Update Project" which appears to be a kind of set of mega systematic reviews on the links between diet/nutrition/exerice on cancer risk. This project has massive amounts of scholarship, data, and experience behind it [2]. You may think the paper is still crap. But maybe think for a moment before rejecting it out of hand. This isn't a single biased study of 30 white college students at Harvard. This is a model based on data from whole nation's cancer registries combined with parameters estimated from the best, hopefully least biased, human trial studies we can manage with the resources available to us. 0. https://www.uicc.org/who-we-are/about-us https://www.uicc.org/who-we-are/about-us 1. https://www.uicc.org/news/globocan-2020-new-global-cancer-data https://www.uicc.org/news/globocan-2020-new-global-cancer-da... 2. https://www.wcrf.org/dietandcancer/a-summary-of-the-third-expert-report/ https://www.wcrf.org/dietandcancer/a-summary-of-the-third-ex...

kaminar 5y ago

Plot twist: all those "cases" were really Covid. Nobody is allowed to have any other disease. As you were.

kaminar 5y ago

Most of you only know your peer group, who are also nerds with jobs. The vast majority of weed smokers are serious drug addicts who do it all day, search for it all day and are also into heavier drugs...besides multiple trips to jail, kids they don't want, families who are either drug addicts or have severed ties due to the damage caused...and finally they lead a severely unhealthy life they hate. You stupid, self righteous hippie wannabes.

xyzzy21 5y ago

Without quantifying the specific amounts of consumption attributable to these deaths, it's pretty meaningless as a statistic. As presented it literally makes claim sound like a wide-eyes, self-righteous temperance fanatic claiming liquor will "send you to hell!" Not much on science and more on religious fervor! We went down the road once before and it made things worse.

archagon 5y ago

If anyone is interested in reducing their alcohol intake, I developed a free and open source iOS app called Good Spirits that lets you set your weekly alcohol quota and syncs down check-ins from Untappd: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/good-spirits/id1434237439 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/good-spirits/id1434237439 The repo is here: https://github.com/archagon/good-spirits https://github.com/archagon/good-spirits I've set the default to 10 standard (US) drinks per week for men, which (at the time the app was developed) seemed to be the upper bound for low-ish risk drinking as established by a large number of health ministries around the world. (Obviously, it's best to drink as little as possible, but I made this app with myself as the target audience: a craft beer enthusiast who doesn't want to get too carried away.)

amanaplanacanal 5y ago

Unfortunately this breathless reporting makes it impossible to determine the actual risk. On average, how much of my lifespan am I losing by drinking? If it's several years, I might decide it's not worth it. If it's several days, I'm not sure I care that much. Is the data available to calculate this?