Bad male drink: 76% of cancer cases attributed to alcoholic drink consumption affect men

The incidence of alcohol consumption in cancer cases has been shown in numerous studies. To these was added a published this month which updated the statistics in this regard and attributed to these drinks more than 741,000 cases of the disease recorded worldwide last year, 76% of which were men.

The study published in the journal The Lancet Oncology, found that of the 741,300 new cases of alcohol-attributable cancer diagnosed last year, 568,700 were males, while females accounted for 172,600 cases. Most of them were cancers of the esophagus, liver and breasts.

Almost 47% of cancers attributable to alcohol were associated with excessive alcohol consumption. For the authors, a measure above what is practical is to drink 60 grams or more of ethyl alcohol, the product with which alcoholic beverages are made, or what comes to the same, more than six measures of drink per day, they said.

The work included an analysis of the data available on alcohol consumption at the population level in 2010 and on cancer cases in 2020. Indeed, they estimated the period between alcohol consumption and cancer onset. in 10 years, since the types of cancer included in the study, such as cancer of the lips and mouth, cancer of the cavity, cancer of the larynx, and breast cancer in women, have long periods of development and previous evidence of a causal relationship with alcohol consumption.

The authors considered that drinking 20 to 60 grams, or two to six glasses of ethyl alcohol per day, is “risky drinking”. This represented 39.4% of cancer cases attributable to alcohol. Moderate consumption, defined as 20 grams or less, or up to two drinks per day, contributed almost 14%, or 1 in 7 cases. The highest rates of alcohol-attributable cancer were among men who drank 30 to 50 grams of ethyl alcohol per day and among women who consumed 10 to 30 grams per day.

One of the study’s authors, Harriet Rumgay, PhD student at the WHO International Agency for Research on Cancer, in a statement, stressed the need to “urgently raise awareness of the link between alcohol consumption and cancer risk among policy makers and the general public,” he said. “Public health strategies such as reducing the availability of alcohol, labeling alcoholic products with a health warning, and marketing bans could reduce rates of cancer caused by alcohol,” he said. -he declares.

Some specialists, however, have highlighted certain limitations of the study. “These estimates, based on standard measurements, are useful because patterns of alcohol use change over time,” the doctor said. Amy C Justice, CNH Long Professor of Medicine and Professor of Public Health at Yale School of Medicine, it is a statement. Justice, who was not part of the study, said that “at the patient level, the combination of counseling and medication can be effective. However, a good understanding of the cancer burden associated with alcohol consumption, the underlying mechanisms and the best way to intervene depends on precise measures of alcohol exposure.

In this sense, he gave as an example that the study does not take into account certain possibilities of alcohol consumption that were not reported and changes in alcohol consumption before and after 2010.

The data to carry out research on alcohol consumption and cancer is information from the Global Information System on Alcohol and Health which records the registered, unregistered and tourist consumption per capita of the participants. Information lacks precision on all the ways alcohol can be consumed because it is difficult to know if a person who has bought a bottle of alcohol has consumed everything themselves.

When assessing alcohol consumption at the population level, the study it also does not take into account individual environmental, physiological, genetic and social risk factors for developing cancer.

In addition, for example, “hepatocellular cancer is the sixth most common cancer in the world and its incidence is increasing. Alcohol consumption is known to increase the risk of hepatocellular cancer in people who are obese, infected with the hepatitis B or C virus, or who smoke, ”the justice said.

The authors also found that cancer cases were lowest in North Africa and West Asia, especially in countries like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. where alcohol is prohibited and “religious policies have ensured that alcohol consumption by the population remains low and lifelong abstention rates remain high.”

“What is new in this study is the global international comparison, disaggregated by sex and type of cancer,” he added. Sadie Boniface, Research Manager at the Institute for Alcohol Studies, for which most of the funds come from the Alliance House Foundation, an organization that promotes total abstinence and the scientific study of alcohol to aid the moral, social and physical well-being of communities. “The results are in line with other studies.”

The researchers also specified that “the synergistic effect between alcohol and tobacco, which is reported as a true interaction for most cancers of the upper aerodigestive tract, has not been taken into account”. Cancer estimates for 2020 may also have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has disrupted health systems and made some patients unsafe to go to doctors, they added.

“The sooner we start to accurately measure alcohol exposure, the sooner we can understand the true excessive burden of cancer attributable to alcohol and intervene effectively,” Justice concluded.

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