A study of over one million British women has found that there is more evidence that moderate alcohol consumption can increase the risk of cancer.
Researchers asked middle aged women at breast cancer screening clinics about their drinking habits, and then tracked their health for seven years. A quarter of the women reported no alcohol use and nearly all of the rest reported drinking fewer than three drinks a day. The average was one drink a day.
Researchers compared those who drunk two or less drinks a week with people drinking more than that and found that each extra drink per day increased the risk of breast, rectal and liver cancer. The type of alcohol didn't matter.
Moderate drinkers had a lower risk of thyroid cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and renal cell cancer.
For an individual woman, the overall alcohol risk is small. In developed countries, about 118 of every 1,000 women develop any of these cancers, and each extra daily drink added 11 breast cancers and four of the other types to that rate, the study found. But population-wide, 13 percent of those cancers in Britain may be attributable to alcohol, the researchers concluded.
In the past occasional drinking was thought to be good for the heart but this study, by University of Oxford researchers, did not address that.
Dr. Philip J. Brooks, who researches alcohol and cancer at the National Institutes of Health said: "You have to balance all those things out. This kind of information is important for people to know and to consult with their physician about the various risk factors they have."