According to research, heavy, daily drinking increases the risk of high-grade prostate cancer.

Zhihong Gong and colleagues set out to determine the effect of alcohol consumption on the effectiveness of finasteride, a drug prescribed to prevent prostate cancer, and also examined the associations of total alcohol, type of alcoholic beverage, and drinking pattern with risks of total, low- and high-grade prostate cancer.

The researchers not only discovered that heavy drinking reduces the cancer-preventing effect of finasteride, but also that study participants who reported heavy alcohol consumption were twice as likely or more to be diagnosed with high-grade prostate cancer.

They used data from more than 10,000 men participating in the Prostate Cancer Prevention Trial. They found participants who reported heavy alcohol consumption (≥50 g alcohol/day) and regular heavy drinking (≥4 drinks/day on ≥5 days per week) were twice as likely or more to be diagnosed with high-grade prostate cancer. Less heavy drinking was not associated with the risk of high-grade prostate cancer.

"The majority of prostate cancers are low-grade," explained Alan Kristal, study author. "They grow very slowly, and 100 percent of men with it live for 10 years. Most men die of something else. With high-grade prostate cancer, survival at 10 years is only 60 to 70 percent."

Most heavy drinkers in the study drank beer, Kristal said. "They are six-pack-a-day drinkers," he said. "But there is no logical reason to think there is anything special about beer that increases the risk that does not apply to other forms of alcohol."

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References:
1. Alan R. Kristal, et al. Alcohol consumption, finasteride, and prostate cancer risk. Cancer, Volume 115 Issue 16, Pages 3661 - 3669. DOI: 10.1002/cncr.24423.

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