Alcohol

Drinking alcohol regularly can increase your risk of developing breast cancer.

To give you an idea of how, let’s take two groups of 100 women. The first group consumes no alcohol at all while every woman in the second group has one drink – say a pint of lager or a large glass of wine – every day.

On average, this second group will produce one, possibly two more cases of breast cancer than the non-drinking group.

The risk increases with each additional daily drink. So, if our one-drink-a-day group increases its intake to two drinks each day, it will exceed the non-drinking group’s breast cancer cases by three or four.

Alcohol consumption, unlike some other established breast cancer risk factors, is something you can change. The Department of Health recommends that women drink no more than two to three units of alcohol per day.

To give you an idea of what this means, here’s a rough guide to the units of alcohol in common drinks.

• 1 pint of ordinary strength lager, bitter or cider = 2 units
• 1 pint of strong lager = 3 units
• small glass of wine, 175 ml = approx 2 units
• large glass of wine, 250 ml = approx 3 units
• pub measure of spirits = 1 unit
• alcopop = 1.5 units

Although there has been little research into the effects of binge drinking on breast cancer risk, it is associated with a wide range of health problems.

Our fact sheet Alcohol and Breast Cancer Risk: The Facts (497 kb) has more information about alcohol and breast cancer. For help with cutting down on drinking visit the NHS Choices website.