About That Correlation Between Boozing and Cancer in Ladies...

Nick Gillespie | March 5, 2009

Remember that study that got big press recently that showed a link between drinking and cancer rates in women? U.K. researcher Naomi Allen told the Wash Post, "If you are regularly drinking even one drink per day, that's increasing your risk for cancer [since] there doesn't seem to be a threshold at which alcohol consumption is safe."

Over at Spiked, Patrick Basham and John Luik say bushwah:

The study is full of significant puzzles that suggest that its results are unreliable. For example, it reports that the incidence of all types of cancer studied in its non-drinking subjects was 5.7 per cent compared with 5.3 per cent for those subjects who had at least a drink a day, and up to 14 drinks a week.

In other words, not only was there no dose-response in terms of cancer risk, but teetotallers had a higher population incidence of cancer than those consuming up to 14 drinks a week!

Even those women in the study who drank the most (15 or more drinks a week) had a cancer incidence of 5.8 per cent, which is virtually identical to those who drank nothing. But this particular take-home message somehow escaped Allen's notice, and that of the media as well.

Bashma and Luik conclude, Allen's "public pronouncements, her recommendations to government, and the reports about her study in the media are certainly not supported by her results."

Whole thing here.