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Beer Science

Cancer Deaths Attributable to Alcohol Rose 58% Over the Last 33 Years (cnn.com) 90

Posted by EditorDavid from the to-your-health dept.
CNN reports that alcohol "may play a greater role in death from numerous types of cancers in the United States than previously known, according to a new study." "While it's true that overall cancer mortality has declined, we found the percentage of cancer deaths proportionally attributable to alcohol rose over 58% in people 20 and older over the last 33 years," said the study's first author Dr. Chinmay Jani... It didn't take much alcohol to raise one's risk — about one standard drink a day, every day, Jani said. In the US, a standard drink is 12 ounces of regular beer, 5 ounces of wine or 1.5 ounces of 80-proof liquor...

Alcohol is ethanol or ethyl alcohol, which is broken down by the liver into acetaldehyde, a "probable human carcinogen," the National Cancer Institute states on its website. While the liver will further break down acetaldehyde into a harmless molecule called acetate, the process isn't foolproof: acetaldehyde may damage DNA and interfere with DNA repair before conversion into acetate is complete. Alcohol also contributes to oxidative stress, which damages DNA, proteins and cell function and creates inflammation. Drinking alcohol also weakens the cells in the mouth and throat, making them more susceptible to carcinogens. That's even more likely to occur with smoking cigarettes, a major source of acetaldehyde. In addition, alcohol interferes with the break down and absorption of key nutrients thought to decrease cancer risk — vitamins A, C, D and E as well as folates in the vitamin B complex, according to the National Cancer Institute.

The study, which was published Monday in The Lancet Regional Health — Americas journal, analyzed more than three decades of US data gathered for the Global Burden of Disease Study. The GBD study is a massive scientific effort to measure health, mortality and disabilities from hundreds of risk factors, diseases and conditions in more than 200 countries and territories. Between 1990 and 2023, the total number of yearly alcohol-linked cancer deaths more than doubled, rising from 11,361 to 23,126 in the US.

Men and adults age 55 and older experienced the greatest impact; alcohol-related cancer mortality rate in older males climbed nearly 24% over the 33-year period. For men, liver cancer deaths showed the strongest link to alcohol, followed by esophageal and colorectal cancers. For women 55 and older, breast cancer was the top killer, followed by liver and colorectal cancers.

Cancer Deaths Attributable to Alcohol Rose 58% Over the Last 33 Years More | Reply

Cancer Deaths Attributable to Alcohol Rose 58% Over the Last 33 Years

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  • I gave it my all.. (Score:3)

    by Petersko ( 564140 ) on Saturday September 05, 2026 @12:56PM (#66324823)

    I really have it the old college try. My liver - and all of my other organs - ultimately forgave my transgressions. We'll see what my brain says when I'm in my 60s, but... cross that bridge.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      but... cross that bridge.

      As Ted Kennedy once said, *I'll drive off that bridge when I get to it.*

    • Re:I gave it my all.. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by cayenne8 ( 626475 ) on Saturday September 05, 2026 @02:48PM (#66324921) Homepage Journal

      I really have it the old college try. My liver - and all of my other organs - ultimately forgave my transgressions. We'll see what my brain says when I'm in my 60s, but... cross that bridge

      Yup...I'm getting up there in years...past 50's.

      I wouldn't trade a second of my years having drinks with friends...at bars at homes...home brewing together, etc.

      And we were smoking back in the day for most of it too....sure, not good for you, but we sure looked cool.

      ;P

      Sure, years are catching up....but would you rather live to be 100+ with a boring life and no friends...or to maybe your 70-80's with a group of buddies you can get together with, and between ya'll actually remember the antics you got into, relive war stories...the trouble, the girls, the fun lives?

      I'm certainly glad I chose the latter...

      A few years ago, I started to actually realize how bad a hangover could feel and I have dropped off drinking almost totally for the most part....but I have the (partial) memories I still enjoy.

      I still brew some beer and save my days for sipping for those mainly...especially if a good LSU game is on tv.....better with old college friends when there too.

      Now...let's get onto grilled and slow smoked BBQ foods eh?

      I'd rather risk years over those that have given them up.

      There's quality vs quantity of life you know...

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Powercntrl ( 458442 )

        It is possible to make friends over other common interests that don't involve drinking. I never cared for alcohol; it just gives me a headache and every drink just tastes like varying degrees of trying to have a beverage while fitting PVC pipes. I made friends over things like gaming, going fishing, the theme parks (yeah, that's a central Florida thing), and the maker scene.

        I'd venture a guess that the reason younger folks aren't doing as much drinking is that social media apps have made it a lot easier t

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by cayenne8 ( 626475 )
          Actually I'd posit that young folks today have more mental problems, more loneliness....and NOT getting laid problems more than my generation is precisely due to lack of alcohol....we used to call it "conversation lubrication".

          It loosed up women and gave a bit more confidence to men.

          I know you're gay, so likely not a 1:1 analogy in your life.

          But, social media and lack of booze, I think IMHO...have ruined a LOT in society.

          Is it a poison? Yes.

          Is it without problems it causes? No

          But you look largely at

          • Since we have clearly moved into "get off my lawn" territory I agree with your conclusion. I am more age challenged than you and do not see as many younger people having genuine experiences that do not involve guidelines. Alcohol blurred some of those, sometimes for the worse, but the experiences were memorable. I drink less now but have no regrets for the good times I had when it was more.
            • 1973 concurring here. I feel like I have already lived through some of the best decades on the planet, at least for the USA. I see progress here and there, but I don't see society and the planet making a dramatic recovery in my lifetime. Maybe I was a few years or even decades late? Because the current timeline kinda sucks. I'm really glad my WWII grandfathers didn't have to see some of modern reality. My Vietnam boomer dad, on the other hand, should have seen some of the consequences of his generation's ch

          • I know you're gay, so likely not a 1:1 analogy in your life.

            I can assume you've heard of gay bars. That was pretty much the entire social scene for gay men before online dating apps came along. Technology literally made it possible to meet other guys without the pretense of being into drinking (which is extremely prevalent among the LGBTQ+ community). That being said, a lot of LGBTQ+ folks do drink, because the limited dating pool means chances are you're not going to get along well with most people you meet, so alcohol as a social lubricant becomes something of

        • Young people are smoking weed or doing edibles because who wants to pay $10 for a beer or a $20 cocktail.

          • I've actually heard that people who aren't into alcohol tend to really enjoy pot instead. That's why I've never touched the stuff, because the last thing I need is blowing the rent money at the local dispensary.

          • Young people are smoking weed or doing edibles because who wants to pay $10 for a beer or a $20 cocktail.

            There is almost nowhere you can smoke cannabis publicly, so statistically no one is going out to smoke weed at an establishment. Therefore we can compare to drinking at home. I buy 12 packs of reasonably high test beer for around $20. Two of those is generally plenty. You can easily spend more than $4 a day on cannabis without even getting into the top shelf stuff. Hell, most smokers can do that even with $8 eighths.

            Cannabis is taking over because it's less harmful in every way than alcohol.

            • There is almost nowhere you can smoke cannabis publicly

              Pretty much any place that allows vaping is going to have no way of telling whether a vape contains nicotine or THC. Edibles look like any other snack food, so those are even easier to bring to social gatherings. Alcohol on the other hand, you'll be paying the prices a venue charges, or you're stuck drinking at home (which kind of defeats the whole social aspect of drinking that the OP was extolling).

              Source: Attending Halloween Horror Nights, where despite having to go through a rather extensive security

              • Getting high is nowhere near as social as alcohol.

                It often makes people quieter, less interactive....alcohol is pretty much the opposite, it's called "conversations lubrication" for a reason....it brings down inhibitions allowing folks to come out of their shells.

                Weed often involves a bit of paranoia, and you don't generally feel comfortable talking to strangers, etc.

          • Young people are smoking weed or doing edibles because who wants to pay $10 for a beer or a $20 cocktail.

            Where the fuck do you live where beers are $10 each or a cocktail is $20?

            Do you only drink at NFL games or something?!?!?!

            $2-$4 beers and $5 cocktails are about the norm when I go to a bar....

    • Majority of activities and things people enjoy carry certain risk of injury or death. There is a fine balance between "surviving" and "living".

  • Even your body wants to kill you (Score:3)

    by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Saturday September 05, 2026 @01:14PM (#66324845)

    Alcohol is ethanol or ethyl alcohol, which is broken down by the liver into acetaldehyde, a "probable human carcinogen," the National Cancer Institute states on its website.

    That saying about living will give you cancer is so true.

    • Living will also cause your penis to fall off, depending on how you live.

      Somehow, it's still a concern for me.

      • Living will also cause your penis to fall off, depending on how you live.

        Somehow, it's still a concern for me.

        I saw that South Park episode. If you avoid gluten, you should be okay.

  • I'll drink to that!

  • Missing some context (Score:4, Interesting)

    by marcle ( 1575627 ) on Saturday September 05, 2026 @03:07PM (#66324947)

    Did alcohol consumption increase to match the increased cancer rates? I thought that in general, alcohol consumption was down.

    • Overall it is but I think among older people heavy drinking has gone up. So the numbers are probably because you've got more people drinking heavily in their old age when they really need to be cutting back or stopping entirely even though overall drinking is way down because young people don't drink very much

      • Overall it is but I think among older people heavy drinking has gone up.

        Anecdotally, yes. Ever since my father retired, alcohol has pretty much become his pastime.

      • You think?

        It's seems more likely that the gains in heart disease deaths due to reduced smoking and pollution have just allowed men to live long enough to get alcohol related cancers.

    • I suspect that the relationship is not linear in a case like this: cancer tends to be a big issue for otherwise healthy-ish people because a lot of varieties of it take some time to develop; either chronic exposure to whatever the carcinogen of concern is or some time after the exposure when your luck with the mechanisms that suppress abnormal cell division eventually fails, or both.

      There is probably a part of the graph that is mostly linear, nondrinkers to very light drinkers to light-ish drinkers; but

    • Re:Missing some context (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Kernel Kurtz ( 182424 ) on Saturday September 05, 2026 @03:43PM (#66324981)

      Did alcohol consumption increase to match the increased cancer rates? I thought that in general, alcohol consumption was down.

      https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/... [www.cbc.ca]

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mjwx ( 966435 )

        Did alcohol consumption increase to match the increased cancer rates? I thought that in general, alcohol consumption was down.

        https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/... [www.cbc.ca]

        Yep... People are still drinking, they're just not going out to drink. Why would you? Just 10 years ago I could go to a Pub in suburban London with £20 in my pocket, have a good night and walk home with change. Now you can barely get 4 pints at a spoons in a commuter town for that. Forget about food.

        So it's cheaper to get a bottle of spirits and drink at home.

    • It's up and down when you're looking at the COVID-affected period of 2020 to present. Like many things.

      Like those other things, it's best to draw a straight line from the 2019 datapoint to the 2026 datapoint, and ignore the points in between. Smooths out the noise in the signal and gives you a better picture of the long-term trend.

      For me personally, my alcohol consumption spiked in 2020-21 then decreased through the next few years, and by 2025 I had mostly stopped due to liver readings being off on the annu

    • Airbags, crumple zones.

      "Modern cars cause cancer" coming next year.

    • I believe American colonials  ... men, women and children ... drank four-times as much alcohol as  puritanical "moderns". Of-course that was "natural" alcohol . Not ! And make that 2 olives with the martini ... dry very dry and gin naturally as no such thing as a vodka martini exists.

    • Did alcohol consumption increase to match the increased cancer rates? I thought that in general, alcohol consumption was down.

      The drinking has gone down, generally. I think people are dying less from smoking and heart disease and automobile accidents. That's also my theory as to why obesity rates increased so much. We got a lot better at helping people manage or treat heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, many cancers, etc. Back in the day, if you loved food, booze, drugs, and hated exercise, you Chris Farley or John Belushi-ed yourself off the planet. When I was a kid, it was not rare for 50 year olds who loved to sm

    • I thought that in general, alcohol consumption was down.

      Alcohol consumption being down is both a factor of a generation (older people didn't stop drinking) and *recent*. This won't have an impact on the cancer statistics for a good 10-20 years.

  • Why just the last 33 years ? Alcohol use has gone down in that period, surely we drink less than our drunken ancestors. Why the sudden spike in cancer ? Is it an ability to measure that has increased, or could it be that corporate liquor has begun using fillers and dyes that are having a detrimental effect on us, but providing a healthy profit for our corporate overlords ?
    I AM paranoid, but they ARE after me, so it all balances nicely.

    • Our drunken ancestors had little access to spirits until fairly recently and only a few people had figured out how to make beers over about 5% ABV so it really depends on what time period you're talking about. Americans drank about four times as much before prohibition as they do now, so there's that.

    • Why just the last 33 years ? Alcohol use has gone down in that period, surely we drink less than our drunken ancestors. Why the sudden spike in cancer ? Is it an ability to measure that has increased, or could it be that corporate liquor has begun using fillers and dyes that are having a detrimental effect on us, but providing a healthy profit for our corporate overlords ? I AM paranoid, but they ARE after me, so it all balances nicely.

      We definitely got better at detecting and treating cancers. So yeah, before you just died of cancer and no one noticed...figured it was something else related to alcoholism. Also, since we're better at treating everything, 50 years ago, if you loved drinking and smoking and didn't manage stress, you'd drop dead before you hit 60. Now?...with the statins and ace inhibitors and various pills and many treatments, you survive or avoid your first heart attack and advance to the next levels in life. I don't th

  • About 90% of doctors consume alcohol.

  • If you want the percentage of deaths due to cancers related to alcohol, encourage smoking. Terminate the Malboro Tax and be done with it. I'd like to pay $1/pack again like it was 1988.

    • Grad school at Penn State 1969:  Camel/Red straights cigs were $0.25/pk . Lots of smoke for those late night problem-solving gigs. Class-rooms were properly served with ash-trays.
  • Pot..., not too bad. Meth... very bad. Heroin... look up deaths compared to alcohol, per capita. Alcohol... very bad. it's a bad drug. Say what you will. How many lives has it destroyed? Families? How many people has it killed in cars? How many thousands has it killed outright. If Alcohol showed up now, as a street drug people are using, it would be outlawed very quickly. Yet we have large populations dedicated to stopping drinking. In SoCal where I live, whole supermarket isles are dedicated to alcohol.
    • Pot may not harm the liver but it certainly harms the brain. I do not know many pot users who are capable of feeling "normal" without being under the influence.

      • Pot may not harm the liver but it certainly harms the brain. I do not know many pot users who are capable of feeling "normal" without being under the influence.

        People who are heavy pot users? Their brain is FUCKED up. I went to college with many sharp kids who started being cool and intelligent...then got REALLY into weed...and within 4 years?...that amazing kid you met was completely gone, replaced with a zombie version of themselves you can't even hold a conversation with. Yeah, people change and shit, but I don't know anyone who makes marijuana a part of their identity who can keep an intelligent conversation. In fact the more I hear someone talking about w

    • Pot..., not too bad. Meth... very bad. Heroin... look up deaths compared to alcohol, per capita. Alcohol... very bad. it's a bad drug. Say what you will. How many lives has it destroyed? Families? How many people has it killed in cars? How many thousands has it killed outright. If Alcohol showed up now, as a street drug people are using, it would be outlawed very quickly. Yet we have large populations dedicated to stopping drinking. In SoCal where I live, whole supermarket isles are dedicated to alcohol. But since alcohol has been around forever, it's accepted as normal, in general. Just because it's accepted generally, doesn't make it a good drug. I'm not against people social drinking. I'm not against people using it even for drug-like purposes. But I do think the latter is dumb.

      NO, NO, NO, NO...alcohol is just the default drug. Nearly everyone has been exposed to it. Until recently, mostly cool kids were exposed to weed, by a cooler friend....the rest of us?...we had our first sip of beer from our dads or something like that. Recreational Drugs are not good or bad. I have many addicts in my family and have known many in life. It's NEVER the booze that made them an alcoholic. It's an underlying disorder: depression, impulse-control, autism, learning disabilities, OCD, etc.

      • I agree that alcohol would be banned if it were discovered today, but mostly because it's ABSOLUTE poison. There's no safe dose.

        You can't buy food adulterated with meth, or crack or heroin or PCP or etc. Alcohol though, you pretty much can't buy food without some alcohol in it. Sugars exist. Yeast is ubiquitous. Fruit, bread, basically anything that's not completely nuked with preservatives or pasturised then freshly opened. Even a bit will happen in your digestive tract.

        From about 0.5%ABV and downwards y

  • Alcohol is OK! yeah, I have a bridge to sell you.

    • Even with that you get the odd story where wine is good for you or beer is good for you etc. Never scotch for some reason. that shit'll kill you. Or me as it happens. Oh well, gotta die of something.

  • I personally do not care how many studies come to similar conclusions. Life is not exactly enjoyable for the most part and moderated drinking helps making existence be more tolerable without any extreme consequences. Prohibitionists and teetotalers should keep their joyless desires to themselves and make themselves feel better by imagining the rest of us burning in hell.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 )
      You do you. For myself, after getting a chemo port implanted on my 49th birthday following having a large tumor and half my colon removed I decided sometime escaping through alcohol was no longer worth it. Maybe too late to decide that but I'd rather give it up that take any more chances. So far I somehow still make it through the day.
  • I have read that alcohol use in the USA and potentially globally (per capita at least I believe, but also potentially in total) is declining, potentially in favor of pharmaceuticals, other chemical alternatives, or even health considerations. I wonder what impact/correlation such trends could show on relevant cancer rates.

  • Life'll kill ya - Warren Zevon

  • So what? It is great to be drunk (and high). The meaning with life is not to live as long as possible.

    OTOH, https://www.bps.org.uk/psychol... [bps.org.uk] having children is no way near as great as being drunk. Read that again.

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