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By Kerry Grens Kerry Grens Tue Mar 15, 2:36 pm ET
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) Having three or more drinks of hard liquor each day
is linked to a greater risk of dying from pancreatic cancer, according to a
study published this week.
The researchers focused on people who were non-smokers, and found that the risk
of cancer death was 36 percent higher among those who drank liquor heavily.
Beer and wine were not linked to pancreatic cancer deaths.
Susan Gapstur, the vice president of epidemiology at the American Cancer
Society, and the lead researcher on this study, said it's unclear whether it's
the type of beverage that matters, or the amount of alcohol in the drink.
Gapstur and her colleagues used survey data from more than a million people,
including more than 400,000 who had never smoked. The participants completed a
questionnaire each year starting in 1982, as part of the American Cancer
Society's Cancer Prevention Study II.
People in the study reported how many drinks they had each day, but not how
much alcohol was in them.
Gapstur said previous research suggests that people tend to pour more hard
liquor than what is considered the standard amount for one drink, a shot and a
half.
"Those who drink hard liquor may be consuming more alcohol per drink" than
those who drink beer or wine, Gapstur told Reuters Health.
Pancreatic cancer is rare: About 11 people out of every 100,000 are diagnosed
with it each year.
Gapstur said that while it may be only the 10th most common cancer diagnosis,
it's the 4th most common cause of cancer death. Of the one million people
included in the study (both smokers and non-smokers), nearly 7,000 died of
pancreatic cancer by 2006.
Previous studies have shown that smoking and obesity are linked to pancreatic
cancer, but researchers have disagreed about alcohol. The new study, while
suggesting a link, does not prove that heavy drinking causes pancreatic cancer,
or vice-versa.
Gapstur said the previous lack of clarity on the issue was due to the
difficulty in separating heavy drinking from smoking in these kinds of studies,
because the two often go hand-in-hand. Her study, which included thousands of
non-smokers who drank heavily, was large enough to tease out the effect of
alcohol alone.
"It's an extremely well-designed study run by experts and a credit to the
American Cancer Society," Richard Stevens at the University of Oxford wrote in
an email to Reuters Health.
"However, pancreatic cancer remains a rare disease, even in heavy drinkers, and
people should consider the way that alcohol increases more common diseases such
as heart disease," Stevens, who was not involved in this study, wrote.
The report is published in the latest issue of the Archives of Internal
Medicine, and was funded by the American Cancer Society.
It's unclear how alcohol might be involved in pancreatic cancer. But Gapstur
and her colleagues point out in the study that long-term drinking can cause
inflammation of the pancreas, which in turn is a risk factor for pancreatic
cancer.
"The major take-home message here is that these findings clearly further
underscore the American Cancer Society's guidelines, which recommend that, if
you drink alcoholic beverages, limit consumption to one drink per day if you're
a woman and two drinks per day if you're a man."
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/eiMm18 Archives of Internal Medicine, March 14, 2011.