Researcher Naomi Allen and her colleagues at the University of Oxford analyzed data from the Million Woman Study, which has been collecting health information from 1.28 million women between ages 50 to 64 since 1996. The researchers wanted to see whether the women’s self-reported drinking habits were linked to the 68,775 cases of cancer that developed during the study.
They found that drinking just one alcoholic drink per day increased the risk of breast, liver and rectal cancer. For women who also smoked, drinking increased the risk of mouth and throat cancer as well. The type of alcohol didn’t matter — women who drank only wine increased their risk as much as women who drank other kinds of alcohol.
Although it’s not clear how alcohol increases cancer risk, Allen says, “there is evidence that moderate alcohol intake– at the levels studied here– increase circulating levels of sex hormones, which are known to be associated with an increased risk of breast cancer.”
“That’s the take-home message,” Allen told the Washington Post. “If you are regularly drinking even one drink per day, that’s increasing your risk for cancer.”
via Study Links Alcohol, Cancer Risk in Women | Online NewsHour | February 25, 2009 | PBS.
Often when I debate prohibitionists, they’ll say that we shouldn’t legalize pot because why would we want to add another harmful substance to the menu of adult choices? That might be a salient point if we hadn’t already made the two most harmful substances legal, alcohol and tobacco. While no substance is harmless, marijuana smoking compared to any other recreational drug has got to be the least harmful choice for self and society.
While women drinking that glass of wine are upping their cancer risk, scientists are discovering that marijuana has anti-cancer properties:
“Cannabinoids possess … anticancer activity [and may] possibly represent a new class of anti-cancer drugs that retard cancer growth, inhibit angiogenesis (the formation of new blood vessels) and the metastatic spreading of cancer cells.” So concludes a comprehensive review published in the October 2005 issue of the scientific journal Mini-Reviews in Medicinal Chemistry.
Naples, Italy: Compounds in marijuana inhibit cancer cell growth in animals and in culture on a wide range of tumoral cell lines, including human breast carcinoma cells, human prostate carcimona cells, and human colectoral carcinoma cells, according to preclinical trial data published in the May issue of the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics.
Wellington, New Zealand: Smoking cannabis, even long-term, is not associated with an increased risk of developing cancers of the head or neck, according to the results of a case control population-based study published in the March issue of the journal Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery.
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