Alcohol intake not linked to lung cancer

Alcohol consumption does not appear to be associated with the risk of lung cancer, at least among light to moderate drinkers, according to a study in the latest issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute​.

While many recent studies have highlighted the health benefits of alcohol, and in particular wine, there is another side to the story - alcohol consumption is thought to be linked to breast cancer risk in women and heart disease in both men and women. However studies of the association between alcohol intake and the risk of lung cancer have so far yielded mixed results.

Dr Luc Djoussé, of the Boston University School of Medicine in the US, and his colleagues examined alcohol consumption in 4,265 participants of the population-based Framingham Study, and 4,973 children of the Framingham Study participants. Most of the participants were light to moderate drinkers.

The authors used conditional logistic regression models to estimate the relative risk of lung cancer according to alcohol consumption. After adjusting for age, sex, amount of tobacco smoked, smoking status, and year of birth, the authors found that alcohol consumption was not significantly associated with lung cancer in either the original cohort of the Framingham study or their children.