WASHINGTON — For years, many women have been buoyed by the news about one of their guilty little pleasures: That nightly glass of wine may not only take the edge off their day but also help them live longer. But now it turns out that sipping a glass of pinot noir may not be such a good idea after all.
A new study involving nearly 1.3 million middle-age British women — the largest ever to examine alcohol and cancer in women — found that just one glass of chardonnay, a single beer or any other type of alcoholic drink per day significantly increases the risk of a variety of cancers.
“That’s the take-home message,” said Naomi Allen of the University of Oxford, who led the study being published March 4 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. “If you are regularly drinking even one drink per day, that’s increasing your risk for cancer.”
Understandably, the study may leave many women scratching their heads, given all the talk about red wine being something akin to a fountain of youth.
Even the “Dietary Guidelines for Americans” says alcohol can be “beneficial,” allowing women as much as one drink a day. But the guidelines were intended to set an upper limit on what might be safe, not a recommended daily dose.
In fact, many previous studies have found that alcohol appears to increase the risk of breast cancer and that heavy drinking could make men and women prone to other cancers as well.
Allen and her colleagues analyzed data collected by the Million Women Study, which since 1996 has been gathering detailed information from 1.28 million women ages 50 to 64. The researchers examined how much alcohol women reported consuming when they volunteered for the study and again three years later, and examined whether there was any link with the 68,775 cancers they developed over an average of the next seven years.
Even among women who consumed as little as 10 grams of alcohol a day on average — the equivalent of about one drink — the risk for cancer of the breast, liver and rectum was elevated, the researchers found. Among women who also smoked, the risk of mouth and throat cancer also increased.
Based on the findings, the researchers estimated that about 5 percent of all cancers diagnosed in women each year in the United States are the result of low to moderate alcohol consumption. Most are breast cancers, with drinking accounting for 11 percent of cases — about 20,000 extra cases each year — the researchers estimated.
“There doesn’t seem to be a threshold at which alcohol consumption is safe,” Allen said.
