United States Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy released a new advisory Friday highlighting the link between alcohol consumption and cancer risk. The advisory includes a host of recommendations to increase awareness about the link, including health warning labels on alcohol products and reassessing recommended drinking limits.
According to the Surgeon General’s Advisory on Alcohol and Cancer Risk, alcohol remains the third-leading preventable cause of cancer in the country, following tobacco and obesity. It is known to increase the risk of at least seven different types of cancer, including breast, liver, colorectal and mouth cancers.
Sixteen percent of breast cancer cases specifically are attributable to alcohol consumption, the surgeon general reported.
“Alcohol is a well-established, preventable cause of cancer, responsible for about 100,000 cases of cancer and 20,000 cancer deaths annually in the United States – greater than the 13,500 alcohol-associated traffic crash fatalities per year in the U.S. – yet the majority of Americans are unaware of this risk,” Murthy wrote in the statement. “This advisory lays out steps we can all take to increase awareness of alcohol’s cancer risk and minimize harm.”
Kara Wiseman, an epidemiologist and assistant professor of public health at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, has researched cancer prevention and alcohol use for years. The advisory cited research Wiseman and two colleagues published in 2021 that found less than half of U.S. adults seeing a clinician reported discussing the cancer risks of alcohol. The study suggests encouraging such discussions could increase awareness and reduce alcohol use.
Research from Kara Wiseman, an assistant professor in the School of Medicine’s Department of Public Health Sciences, is highlighted in the surgeon general’s report. (University Communications photo)
“As a public health professional, it was rewarding to see some of my research being used to inform recommendations from the Office of the Surgeon General,” she said. “Even though the path to implementation of new health warning labels might be long, our previous work found that the majority of adults support them.”
In 2019, Wiseman published some of the first research investigating the awareness of alcohol as a cancer risk factor and found that only 38% of the U.S. population at the time knew of the link. Three years later, she published an article in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine with fellow researchers that found roughly two-thirds of U.S. adults supported adding health warning labels to beverages containing alcohol.
Dr. Fern Hauck is a professor of family medicine and public health sciences at the UVA School of Medicine and directs the International Family Medicine Clinic at UVA. She praises the advisory and said she hopes Congress will heed the advice to update warning labels.
