U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy issued a new advisory Friday highlighting the link between alcohol consumption and cancer risk. The advisory includes a host of recommendations aimed at increasing awareness of this connection, including health warning labels on alcohol products and reassessing recommended drinking limits.
According to the Surgeon General’s Opinion on Alcohol and Cancer Risk, Alcohol remains the third preventable cause of cancer in the country, after tobacco and obesity. It is known to increase the risk of at least seven different types of cancer, including breast, liver, colorectal and oral cancers.
Sixteen percent of breast cancer cases are specifically attributable to alcohol consumption, the surgeon general reported.
“Alcohol is a well-established and preventable cause of cancer, responsible for approximately 100,000 cancer cases and 20,000 cancer deaths in the United States – more than the 13,500 deaths per year in related traffic accidents. to alcohol – but the majority of Americans are unaware of this risk,” Murthy wrote. in the declaration. “This advice sets out steps we can all take to increase awareness of alcohol-related cancer risk and minimize harm.”
Kara Wiseman, an epidemiologist and assistant professor of public health at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, has been conducting research on cancer prevention and alcohol consumption for years. The cited opinion research by Wiseman and two colleagues published in 2021 which found that fewer than half of U.S. adults seeing a clinician reported discussing alcohol-related cancer risks. The study suggests that encouraging such discussions could increase awareness and reduce alcohol consumption.
“As a public health professional, it was gratifying to see some of my research be used to inform recommendations from the Office of the Surgeon General,” she said. “Although the road to implementing new health warning labels could be long, our previous work found that the majority of adults support them. »
In 2019, Wiseman published some of the first research investigating awareness of alcohol as a cancer risk factor and found that only 38% of the US population at the time knew of this connection. Three years later, she published an article in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine along with other researchers who found that about two-thirds of American adults supported adding health warning labels to drinks containing alcohol.
Dr. Fern Hauck is a professor of family medicine and public health sciences at the UVA School of Medicine and directs the UVA International Family Medicine Clinic. She praised the advisory and said she hopes Congress heeds the advice to update warning labels.