Heavy drinking tied to pancreatic cancer deaths

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.