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Drinking in Early Adulthood Can Increase Breast Cancer Risk

By 2 Comments2 min read

Women who believe that drinking moderate amounts of alcohol won’t increase their risk of breast cancer may want to think again.

Last year, Wendy Chen, MD, of the Susan F. Smith Center for Women’s Cancers at Dana-Farber and her colleagues published a study showing that women who drank as little as three to six glasses of wine or other alcoholic beverages a week increased their breast cancer risk by about 15 percent.

Drinking alcohol as a young woman can increase the risk of breast cancer.

Drinking alcohol as a young woman can increase the risk of breast cancer.

In a study published this month to examine the effect of drinking alcohol earlier in life, Chen and her associates found that women who drank in early adulthood had a higher risk of developing cancer than did young women who abstained from alcohol. For every 10 grams of alcohol consumed on average on a weekly basis, a woman’s risk rose by 11 percent. (A standard drink, such as a can of beer or a small glass of wine, contains about 12 grams of alcohol.)

Drinkers during early adulthood also had a 16 percent higher risk of developing proliferative benign breast disease – a condition that raises the risk that cancer will develop later on.

For all women, consuming higher amounts of alcohol was associated with a higher risk of breast cancer.

The new research drew on data from a study that has been tracking the health of hundreds of thousands of women for more than more than two decades. The researchers analyzed 20 years of medical records of 117,000 young women who didn’t have breast cancer when the tracking period began.

These findings support the theory that women’s breast tissue in early adult life is particularly susceptible to cancer-causing substances, potentially including alcohol.

Courtesy of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

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