Booze link to cancer

TIPPING back seven or more alcoholic drinks a week appears to raise a black woman’s risk of breast cancer, new research says.

Previous studies linking alcohol intake with a higher risk for breast cancer involved primarily white women, the study’s authors explained.

The current study, published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, found that black women did not seem to escape this risk.

“Alcohol is an important modifiable exposure, whereas many other risk factors are not,” said study author Melissa Troester in a journal news release.

She’s director of the Centre for Environmental Health and Susceptibility at the University of North Carolina’s Gillings School of Global Public Health.

Troester said that women who were concerned about their risk of breast cancer might want to consider drinking less if they were currently drinking more than seven drinks a week.

For the new study, the researchers reviewed questionnaires completed by more than 22 000 black women on their alcohol intake.

Overall, black women drink less alcohol than white women, the researchers said.

But black women who had at least seven drinks each week were at greater risk for nearly all subtypes of breast cancer.

The women who consumed 14 or more alcoholic drinks on a weekly basis were 33% more likely to develop breast cancer than women who had four or fewer drinks a week, the study found.