Less alcohol means a lower risk. French scientists have now proven this with data from more than 850,000 alcohol addicts, for whom the risk fell by around 40 percent through treatment or abstinence.
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“Alcohol consumption is associated with many diseases and harms, for example with various types of cancer: oral, laryngeal, esophageal, liver, colon and breast cancer. The disease burden of alcohol-associated cancer is significant, accounting for 4.1 percent of all cancers worldwide in 2020,” Michael Schwarzinger of the Department of Prevention at the University Hospital of Bordeaux in France and his co-authors, including Jürgen Rehm of the WHO European Regional Office, recently wrote in “Lancet Public Health” (DOI: 10.1016/S2468-2667(24)00107-5).
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Conversely, less alcohol should mean fewer cases of cancer. This is what the scientists have now been able to show with their analysis of data from more than 650,000 patients diagnosed with alcohol dependence. The starting point was the information from 10.3 million men and 13.7 million women who were discharged from hospital in France between 2018 and 2021. 645,720 men (6.3 percent) and 219,323 women (1.6 percent) had also been diagnosed with alcohol addiction.
Three quarters of cancer cases in men
Further analyses clearly showed that less alcohol also means fewer cases of cancer: 38 percent of men and 40 percent of women with addictions were receiving treatment for their alcohol addiction or were abstinent. For these two groups, the risk of cancer was reduced by 42 percent for men and 38 percent for women. There were around 50 percent fewer cases of liver cancer in both sexes, and esophageal cancer fell by 36 percent for men and 41 percent for women. The risk of colon cancer was reduced by around 40 percent in each case.
Men have the biggest cancer problem related to alcohol because they drink much more than women. “Men are affected by around three quarters of alcohol-related cancers because they consume more alcohol on average,” the experts wrote.
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