This drug class, known as GLP-1 agonists, includes semaglutide—approved as Ozempic for type 2 diabetes and Wegovy for obesity—and tirzepatide—approved as Mounjaro for diabetes and Zepbound for obesity. Some of these protective effects likely result from patients’ weight loss when taking these medications, but the drugs appear to have other effects that improve health independent dealing with an alcoholic: how to cope of the weight loss. More evidence suggests that medications such as Ozempic and Mounjaro, originally developed for diabetes and then approved for obesity, have benefits that go beyond these conditions. Those include lower risk of 10 cancers, protection against heart and kidney diseases, and reduction in systemic inflammation, according to recently published research.

The more alcohol you consume, the greater your risk.

Our hypothesis is that having depression and anxiety leads to increased alcohol use, which can then lead to higher rates of liver damage and then eventually cirrhosis. One way that obesity is thought to increase the risk of cancer is because adipose (fat) tissue releases inflammatory hormones that can then cause uncontrolled cell growth, Thosani says. What that means is that nations in those areas of Africa should be thinking now about strategies to control drinking.

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Sonali Thosani, an endocrinologist at MD Anderson, agreed that it’s reassuring to see reduced cancer risks with long-term use of these drugs. “When GLP-1s first came out, there was some concern about them causing an increased risk of pancreatic cancer,” she says, and studies have shown mixed results on risk of thyroid cancer with these medications, but these findings are encouraging. Lung cancer had the largest number of cases tied to preventable risk factors assessed by researchers. The next most common preventable cancer included 50,570 cases of skin melanoma and 44,310 colorectal cancers. The study estimated that, in 2019, 40% of the nearly 1.8 million cancers in adults 30 and older were attributable to “potentially modifiable risk factors.” It examined 30 types of cancer and excluded non-melanoma skin cancers.

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Incidence rates have been creeping up about 1% a year, while death rates have been falling a little more than 1% a year. “We’re not being honest with people,” said breast cancer surgeon Laura Esserman, director of the University of California San Francisco Breast Care Center, who was not involved with the research. After a nationally representative sample of U.S. women between the ages of 39 and 49 learned about the pros and cons of mammography, more than twice as many elected to wait until they turn 50 to get screened, a study released Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine found. New research makes the case for educating women in their 40s — who’ve been caught in the crossfire of a decades-long debate about whether to be screened for breast cancer with mammograms — about the harms as well as the benefits of the exam.

1. Administration of ethanol for 2 weeks after tumor inoculation affected neither tumor growth nor metastasis.
2. This effect was noted for several digestive tract cancers, specifically cancers of the esophagus and the nonglandular forestomach5 (Doll et al. 1999).
3. But awareness of the risk from drinking wine was similar in both those who had and hadn’t sought cancer information.
4. A higher dose of 0.4 percent w/v ethanol, however, inhibited invasion of SKBR3 cells and created mixed results for BT474, with one study (Aye et al. 2004) detecting no effect on invasion and another study (Xu et al. 2010) detecting increased invasion.

In other cases, alcohol may slow the body’s ability to break down and get rid of some harmful chemicals. That said, Dr. DuVall continued, high alcohol use in AYAs who have or had cancer is not necessarily surprising. But the All of Us study, Dr. Cao and her colleagues explained, offered a unique opportunity to take a robust look at people in these groups in the United States.

However, an inverse correlation existed between alcohol consumption and deaths from prostate cancer, suggesting that alcohol consumption likely does not affect advanced or fatal prostate cancer. A high proportion of American adults, both drinkers and non-drinkers (35), are unaware of the association between alcohol consumption and cancer risk. However, the fact that most Americans are unaware of the association suggests effective evidence-based strategies are needed to increase awareness, encourage informed decision making, modify health behavior, and develop policies to reduce consumption. Fifth, caution is required when applying our results to ethnic groups other than Korean individuals, because the genetic background for alcohol metabolism39 and drinking culture vary depending on ethnicity.

However, based on more recent, comprehensive studies, public health experts now generally agree that alcohol—including wine—does not have a so-called “cardioprotective” effect. Nevertheless, the research team also asked participants about the purported heart health benefits of alcohol, to see if it was related to their awareness about alcohol and cancer risk. The antimetastatic effect of ethanol on the B16BL6 melanoma tumor was confirmed after injection of tumor cells in male C57BL/6J mice that carry a gene for obesity and which had consumed 20 percent ethanol in drinking water for 10 weeks (Kushiro and Nunez 2012). Different groups were analyzed for lung tumor metastasis over a period of 16 to 21 days. All of the water- drinking animals had developed visible lung metastases at 16 days after tumor injection, whereas some of the ethanol-drinking mice did not develop lung metastases until 21 days. More-over, the numbers of lung metastases in the ethanol-drinking mice were significantly lower at 21 days.

With the immune system being compromised, alcohol consumption can exacerbate damage from viral infections such as hepatitis C virus, which is common among chronic alcoholic liver disease patients [43]. In addition, heavy episodic alcohol use might reduce the immune system’s defence against infection by disrupting the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines and increasing alcohol and the brain the expression of anti-inflammatory cytokines [33]. This is contrary to the increased expression of pro-inflammatory cytokines due to chronic alcohol exposure as discussed with other evidence on alcohol-induced inflammation (Section 3.3). WCRF found an inverse association between alcohol consumption and kidney cancer risk (RR 0.92 (95% CI 0.86–0.97) per 10 g per day) [7].

The increased intratumoral vascular volume strongly correlated with the increase in tumor volume as well as with intratumoral connective tissue volume density. Finally, invasion of HT1080 cells from the tumor into blood vessels (i.e., intravasation), which occurs during metastasis, increased more than eightfold in response to ethanol. In summary, several reports indicate that alcohol consumption decreases survival of patients with cancer, whereas other studies did not observe this association. The effect of alcohol consumption on mortality of women with breast cancer is particularly complex and seems to differ according to age, estrogen receptor status, and extent of alcohol drinking. Clearly, more breast cancer–specific studies are needed that correlate mortality with the properties of the cancer and the level of alcohol consumption.

But for some types of cancer, most notably breast cancer, consuming even small amounts of alcohol can increase risk. Alcohol use is one of the most important preventable risk factors for cancer, along with tobacco use and excess body weight. Alcohol use accounts for about 6% of all cancers and 4% of all cancer deaths in the United States. In one of the first experiments conducted in melanoma, 6- to 8-week-old female CDBA/2F1 mice consumed water or 20 percent alcohol for 52 weeks before being inoculated in a leg with the Cloudman 8-91 melanoma tumor (Ketcham et al. 1963). When the tumors reached a size of 1.5 to 2.0 cm (about 28 days after tumor inoculation), the groups were divided in half, and half of each group had the primary tumor-bearing leg amputated.

Importance  The impact of serial changes in alcohol consumption on dementia risk has rarely been investigated to date. HRs (squares) were adjusted for age, sex, smoking status, regular exercise, area of residence, income, comorbidities (hypertension, diabetes, and dyslipidemia), systolic blood pressure, and laboratory results (fasting glucose levels, total cholesterol, and serum creatinine). In focus group discussions, some participants identified that zero alcohol products could how to help an alcoholic parent act as a gateway to future alcohol use by enabling young people to become accustomed to the taste of alcoholic products. You and your community can take steps to improve everyone’s health and quality of life. These include the availability of alcohol, increases in people experiencing mental health conditions, and challenges in accessing health care. Upon analysis, researchers found that cigarette smoking was attributable to the largest percentage of cancer cases, at almost 20%.

In this review, we aim to summarise the epidemiological evidence on alcohol and cancer risk and the mechanistic evidence of alcohol-driven carcinogenesis. We searched the PubMed and Cochrane databases for reviews, umbrella reviews, meta-analyses, and Mendelian randomisation studies on total alcohol use and cancer risk and mechanisms of alcohol-related carcinogenesis published up until June 2021. We also searched the WCRF’s Continuous Update Project reports for meta-analyses on alcohol consumption and cancer risk.

Clearly, more mechanistic research is needed in murine models to serve as a template for further examination of the complex interactions connecting alcohol to tumor growth, metastasis, and survival in humans. However, some individuals with the defective form of ALDH2 can become tolerant to the unpleasant effects of acetaldehyde and consume large amounts of alcohol. Epidemiologic studies have shown that such individuals have a higher risk of alcohol-related esophageal cancer, as well as of head and neck cancers, than individuals with the fully active enzyme who drink comparable amounts of alcohol (31). These increased risks are seen only among people who carry the ALDH2 variant and drink alcohol—they are not observed in people who carry the variant but do not drink alcohol. An American Cancer Society study published this week estimates 40% of new cancer cases of 44% of cancer deaths in people 30 and over could be avoided if people cut out high-risk behaviors, such as smoking and drinking. Experts say the study provides fresh evidence for public health leaders to encourage people to adopt healthy lifestyles to reduce the risk of cancer and ample evidence that people should take action to prevent it.

These studies, which reported a total of 115,199 cases, investigated alcohol’s effects on the risk for developing cancer at a total of 19 sites in the body or at all sites combined (see the table and figure for a summary of the studies and their findings for each of those sites). The functionality of the innate immune system also can be correlated with tumor progression. A recent study compared innate immune-system functionality with the number of circulating tumor cells in patients with a variety of cancers. In patients with metastatic disease, these circulating tumor cells are promising as biomarkers for tumor progression and overall cancer survival, with relatively high circulating cell numbers correlated with a poor prognosis. Decreased NK cytolytic activity also has been linked with other types of cancer, including colorectal cancer (Kim et al. 2013), metastatic melanoma (Konjevic et al. 2007), and head and neck cancer (Baskic et al. 2013). Alcohol consumption also has been linked to cancers of the large bowel (i.e., colon and rectum) in both men and women and to breast cancer in women, although these associations have not yet been proven unequivocally.

Cancers of the upper aerodigestive tract can also be characterised as having a more than multiplicative increased risk when alcohol and tobacco are consumed together. For oesophageal squamous cell carcinoma, a cohort study in the Netherlands observed an eight times risk among current smokers who drank 15 g alcohol or more per day, compared with never smokers who consumed less than 5 g alcohol per day [12]. Researchers also studied the effects of alcohol on estrogen receptor–negative mouse mammary tumors. One study involving estrogen receptor–negative Met-1 cancer cells used female FVB/N mice that consumed 20 percent w/v ethanol in drinking water for 18 weeks before they were injected subcutaneously with the cancer cells (Hong et al. 2010).

In terms of risk assessment, this meta-analysis confirms that high levels of alcohol consumption (i.e., more than four drinks per day) result in a substantial risk of cancer development at several sites. At the same time, other studies have shown that moderate alcohol consumption can have protective effects against certain types of heart disease. Accordingly, one must determine whether moderate alcohol consumption results in an overall favorable or unfavorable risk-benefit balance for the individual drinker or an entire population. This balance depends on the age, gender, and baseline disease rates among the members of a given population. Consequently, any definite risk-benefit assessment for moderate alcohol drinking requires much more far-reaching analyses that are beyond the scope of this article but that in the future may provide important information from a public health perspective.