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Light Drinking Linked to Increased Breast Cancer Risk
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Drinking as few as three to six glasses of wine per week may increase a woman's lifetime risk of breast cancer by 15%, according to an analysis by Harvard researchers. The study, published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., reaffirms that heavy alcohol use raises breast cancer risk, and it adds that light drinking matters too.
"Alcohol is a real risk factor, and the more you drink the higher your risk," said Dr. Steven A. Narod, the Canada research chair in breast cancer at the University of Toronto, who wrote a commentary accompanying the study. Whether women should consider abstaining from even light alcohol consumption, however, is not easily answered, preventive health experts said.
On average, a U.S. woman's baseline risk of breast cancer is 1 in 8 over her lifetime, according to the American Cancer Society. The 15% increased risk that was linked to consumption of 5 to 9.9 grams of alcohol per day is modest, similar to the heightened risk associated with using estrogen-progesterone hormone therapy to treat symptoms of menopause. But it's far smaller than the fivefold increased risk that comes from inheriting certain mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes.
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