Looking to Drink Less This Year? Doing So Could Reduce Risk of Certain Cancers

Good news if you made a New Year’s resolution to drink less: A new report indicates quitting drinking could cut your risk of developing certain cancers. “We cannot talk about a so called safe level of alcohol use. It doesn’t matter how much you drink—the risk to the drinker’s health starts from the first drop of any alcoholic beverage.

The only thing that we can say for sure is that the more you drink, the more harmful it is—or, in other words, the less you drink, the safer it is,” Carina Ferreira Borges, acting unit lead for noncommunicable disease management and regional advisor for alcohol and illicit drugs in the WHO Regional Office for Europe said in a Jan.

3, 2023, news release. Knowing the risks alcohol poses for developing cancer, the research team at IARC wanted to know if there was any less of a risk of developing certain types of cancer if people drank less or stopped drinking altogether. To answer this question, the IARC team analyzed multiple studies from across the world to determine if cancer risk declines with reduced alcohol consumption.

They looked at cohort studies, which followed a group of participants for years, and case controlled studies examining differences between people with cancer and those without. The results indicated that reducing alcohol use led to a reduced risk of cancer. Those who stopped drinking for five to nine years were 23 percent less likely to develop cancer, while those who stopped drinking for 10 to 19 years were 34 percent less likely.

Alcohol cessation for at least 20 years suggested a reduced cancer risk of 55 percent. “Potential protective effects of alcohol consumption, suggested by some studies, are tightly connected with the comparison groups chosen and the statistical methods used, and may not consider other relevant factors,” said Jürgen Rehm, WHO regional director for Europe’s Advisory Council for Noncommunicable Diseases and senior scientist at the Institute for Mental Health Policy Research and the Campbell Family Mental Health Research Institute at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, Canada..