Does early-life alcohol intake raise high-grade PCa risk?
Researchers studied data from a racially diverse cohort of 650 men undergoing a prostate biopsy between January 2007 and January 2018.
Researchers studying alcohol consumption in men having prostate biopsies found those reporting heavy drinking earlier in life were more likely to have high-grade
“The World Cancer Research Fund recently issued a recommendation to avoid alcohol for the purposes of cancer prevention. This recommendation is based on the established role of alcohol in risk of oral and gastrointestinal cancers, and additional research is required to understand if alcohol plays a role in prostate cancer,” according to senior author Emma Allott, PhD, who conducted the research when she was an assistant professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s Gillings School of Global Public Health. Currently, Dr. Allott is a lecturer in molecular cancer epidemiology at Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland.
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Despite increasing evidence that alcohol is a risk factor for many other cancer types, alcohol’s effect on prostate cancer is unclear. Studies looking at men’s current drinking and prostate cancer risk have yielded conflicting results. Researchers examining lifetime alcohol exposure and prostate cancer risk seem to show a positive association with low- and high-grade prostate cancer. Some of those studies have suggested an association between early-life alcohol consumption and prostate cancer, but few researchers have looked specifically how drinking early in life might impact prostate cancer or cancer grade later.
“Potentially, research studies assessing alcohol intake around the time of prostate cancer diagnosis may miss any effect of alcohol on prostate cancer,” Dr. Allott said.
The evidence suggests that prostate carcinogenesis might span decades, which makes considering early-life alcohol exposure important for better understanding prostate cancer etiology, the authors wrote. The study was published in
Dr. Allott and co-authors studied data from a racially diverse cohort of 650 men undergoing a prostate biopsy at the Durham Veterans Affairs Medical Center between January 2007 and January 2018. Men in the study completed a questionnaire about how much alcohol they consumed, from none to seven or more drinks weekly, during each decade of their lives.
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