Friday, 23 January, 2026
The Drinks Business, James Bayley
A new paper published in BMC Medicine examines whether alcohol consumption causes cancer using Mendelian randomisation, a method that relies on genetic proxies rather than self-reported drinking. The study by Larsson et al. draws on data from more than 1.5 million participants across four large biobanks and several cancer consortia.
The analysis tested genetically predicted alcohol consumption against the risk of 20 cancers. As per the abstract, no association was observed between alcohol intake and overall cancer incidence, with an odds ratio of 0.96 per standard deviation increase in consumption and a non-significant p-value of 0.45.
Overall cancer risk remains neutral
The absence of an overall cancer signal is one of the paper’s most striking outcomes. Despite alcohol’s classification by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as a Group 1 carcinogen, the genetic data did not support the idea that alcohol consumption is a cause of all cancers, according to the study’s conclusions.
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