Just One Drink A Day Ups Cancer Risk

This bit of bad news, recently published in the American Journal of Public Health, comes from researchers at Boston University School of Medicine, who synthesized risk estimates from hundreds of other studies and now believe that 6,000 American deaths a year can be blamed on cancer caused by moderate drinking, which, yikes! they define as a drink and a half per day or less. BU Today reports on the study, whose results are based on calculations using three types of data: the numbers of people who drink at different levels, the prevalence of various cancers at those various drinking levels, and the number of cancer deaths among people at each level. BU Today reports that for men, lethal alcohol-caused cancer typically afflicts the mouth, throat, and esophagus. In women, breast cancer is the most common cancer killer linked to alcohol consumption.