Did You Know? Even Moderate Drinking Can Be Comparable to Smoking
Author: 一毫秒的永恒
A British study found that the additional cancer risk associated with drinking one bottle of wine per week was roughly equivalent to smoking 5 cigarettes per week for men and 10 for women. The study used data from nonsmokers and converted the risks through an epidemiological model.
Published in the British journal BMC Public Health on March 28, 2019, it was one of the first studies to estimate the relationship between alcohol and cigarettes in terms of cancer risk.
The study aimed to communicate the cancer risks of moderate drinking more effectively. Moderate alcohol consumption is widely believed to be less harmful than smoking, but research in the United States and the United Kingdom has found that many people are unaware of the relationship between alcohol and cancer. A 2017 survey by the American Society of Clinical Oncology, for example, found that roughly 70% of Americans did not know that drinking alcohol was a carcinogenic risk factor.
“We estimated the number of cigarettes that would carry the same cancer risk as a bottle of wine,” said Dr. Theresa Hydes of gastroenterology and hepatology at University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, the study’s lead author. “This lets us communicate the potential cancer risk of drinking more intuitively by drawing on what people already know about the harms of smoking. By using cigarettes as a comparison, we hope to help people make better-informed lifestyle choices.” The comparison is an inventive and useful way to help people see the carcinogenic risk of alcohol more accurately.
It is important to note, however, that the study did not claim that the carcinogenic risk of moderate drinking was identical to that of smoking. It considered only the cancer risk of drinking and did not account for effects on other health conditions. It also assessed the lifetime cancer risk of the general population, which may differ from the cancer risk faced by an individual who smokes or drinks.
Alcohol and Cigarettes
The study set out to answer a question: in terms of cancer risk, how many cigarettes are equivalent to drinking one bottle of wine, containing approximately 80 grams of pure alcohol? Using data on cancer risk in the general British population and previously published research on the relationships among alcohol, smoking, and cancer, the researchers estimated that among nonsmokers, drinking one bottle of wine per week increased men’s lifetime cancer risk by 1.0% and women’s by 1.4%. Put differently, if 1,000 men and 1,000 women each drank a bottle of wine every week, about 10 of the men and 14 of the women might develop cancer because of their drinking later in life. The higher risk among women was mainly due to the close association between alcohol consumption and breast cancer. The effect was equivalent to smoking 5 cigarettes per week for men and 10 for women.
A “Carcinogen We All Know”
“Most people know that cigarettes cause cancer,” Seitz said. “It is useful for the public to hear that a certain amount of alcohol carries the same cancer risk as a certain number of cigarettes.” He also observed that although alcohol is a known carcinogen, the cancer risks associated with it are rarely discussed. Some dietary guidelines even recommend a daily amount of alcoholic drinks. “If I did not call it alcohol, wine, beer, or cocktails and simply called it a carcinogen,” Seitz said, “no one would ask how many glasses of carcinogen you plan to drink.”
The researchers also noted that because the study considered only cancer risk, it did not account for other illnesses associated with smoking or drinking, such as respiratory, cardiovascular, or liver disease.
Although 5 to 10 cigarettes per week may not sound like many, smokers typically consume far more. British smokers, for example, average about 80 cigarettes per week, while smokers in the United States consume about 100 per person each week. Nevertheless, the researchers emphasized that “these findings show that the health risks of moderate drinking are an important public-health issue.”
Reference
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