Drink a day increases cancer risk

Drink a day increases cancer risk

A glass of wine each evening is enough to increase your risk of developing cancer, women are being warned.

Consuming just one drink a day causes an extra 7,000 cancer cases - mostly breast cancer - in UK women each year, Cancer Research UK scientists say.

The risk goes up the more you drink, whether spirits, wine or beer, the data on over a million women suggests.

Overall, alcohol is to blame for about 13% of breast, liver, rectum, mouth and throat cancers, the researchers say.

They estimate that about 5,000 cases of breast cancer in the UK - 11% of the 45,000 cases diagnosed each year - can be attributed to women's consumption of alcohol.

The study looked specifically at women who consumed low to moderate levels of alcohol - defined as three drinks a day or fewer.

Over the seven years of the study, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, a quarter of the 1.3 million women reported drinking no alcohol.

" About 5% of all cancers in the UK are due to drinking something in the order of one alcoholic drink a day "
Lead author Dr Naomi Allen

Of those who did drink, virtually all consumed fewer than 21 drinks per week, and an average of 10g of alcohol per day, which is equivalent to just over one unit of alcohol found in half a pint of lager, a 125ml glass of wine or a single measure of spirits.

Nearly 70,000 of the middle-aged women developed cancer and a pattern emerged with alcohol consumption.

One too many?

Consuming one drink a day increased the risk of all types of cancer by 6% in women up to the age of 75.

The rates for individual cancers varied, with one drink a day causing a 12% rise in the risk of breast cancer, a 10% rise in rectal cancer, a 22% rise in gullet cancer, a 29% rise in mouth cancer and a 44% rise in throat cancer.

KNOW YOUR LIMITS

Women are advised to drink no more than 2-3 units a day

Men are advised to drink no more than 3-4 units a day

A unit = half a pint of beer, a small (125ml) glass of wine, a shot or a small (25ml) measure of spirits

On a population scale, this would mean 15 extra cases of these cancers diagnosed for every 1,000 women - comprising 11 breast, one mouth, one rectal cancer and 0.7 each for cancers of the gullet, throat and liver.

The government says no amount of alcohol is fully safe, but recommends women should drink no more than two to three units per day on a regular basis to have a lower risk of any harm to health.

For men the recommended limit is no more than three to four units per day.

Mixed messages

Lead author Dr Naomi Allen from the University of Oxford said her work would help the government assess whether the limits should be changed, although the study did not look at men.

"The findings of this report show quite strongly that even low levels of drinking that were regarded to be safe do increase cancer risk.

"About 5% of all cancers in the UK are due to drinking something in the order of one alcoholic drink a day."

She said there was confusion about how much people should drink. Research has shown a daily tipple can be good for the heart. And factors other than alcohol pose a bigger risk for certain cancers.

"It is up to individual people to make their own decision. All of us to some extent have to weigh up the risks and take some responsibility for our health," said Dr Allen.

" Around 80% of breast cancer cases are diagnosed in women aged over 50, so limiting how much you drink is one step you can take to try to reduce your risk of developing the disease "
Dr Sarah Cant, Breakthrough Breast Cancer

A Department of Health spokesman said: "We keep our guidance on sensible drinking under review. We currently advise on a lower risk drinking limit and that drinking above this level could be harmful.

"There is no completely safe level of drinking but this lower level reflects the known risks including breast cancer, which is partly why there is a lower drinking limit for women.

"We look forward to examining this research in more detail."

Dr Sarah Cant of Breakthrough Breast Cancer said: "We already know that drinking alcohol can increase your risk of breast cancer.

"This study suggests that for women over 50 even drinking moderate amounts of any type of alcohol can have many health consequences, including a greater chance of developing breast cancer.

"Around 80% of breast cancer cases are diagnosed in women aged over 50, so limiting how much you drink is one step you can take to try to reduce your risk of developing the disease."

Breast cancer is now the most common cancer in the UK. Each year almost 45,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer. A woman's lifetime risk for breast cancer in the UK is one in nine.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/7906355.stm

Published: 2009/02/24 21:00:24 GMT

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How to build a star on Earth

How to build a star on Earth

Physicist Professor Brian Cox has looked at the different strategies now being pursued to make nuclear fusion a reality. His personal assessment is presented on the BBC's Horizon programme.

" If a steady stream of mini-stars can be created, then a power station could be constructed "
Prof Brian Cox

Nuclear fusion is nature's power source. From the Sun to the most distant stars, the energy that lights up the Universe is released by sticking hydrogen nuclei together to make helium.

Since hydrogen is the most abundant element in the Universe, it seems sensible to ask whether we might endeavour to do the same and power ourselves out of our serious energy crisis by building stars on Earth.

The problem of course is that stars are big and hot; the Sun is the size of a million Earths, and burns six hundred million tonnes of hydrogen fuel every second.

The temperature at its core is 15 million degrees, and this is barely enough to allow fusion to take place at anything other than a snail's pace.

Despite the obvious difficulties, however, the UK has hosted a working nuclear fusion reactor in Oxfordshire for the last three decades.

Jet, the Joint European Torus, routinely heats a cocktail of different forms of hydrogen known as deuterium and tritium to well over one hundred million degrees and initiates nuclear fusion at a rate far in excess of that in the centre of the Sun.

FIND OUT MORE...

Horizon: Can We Build a Star on Earth? is on BBC Two on Tuesday, 17 February, at 2100 GMT

Catch it later on the BBC

Jet is too small to produce meaningful amounts of electricity, but it is a prototype for a much bigger and potentially commercial design called Iter, now under construction in southern France.

The Jet/Iter approach to fusion is to heat and contain a gas so hot that the electrons are stripped away from the atomic nuclei to form a lively and difficult to control sub-atomic soup known as a plasma.

The plasma is held in an intense magnetic bottle so it never touches the walls of the reactor. If enough deuterium-tritium plasma can be held for long enough at a high enough temperature and pressure, Nature will do the rest. The result is helium and clean, abundant energy.

In the US, a different approach known as inertial fusion is being perused at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California and the Z-Machine in New Mexico. If Iter is like a conventional power station burning fuel for days or weeks at a time, the inertial projects share more in common with the combustion engine.

NIF blasts tiny pellets of deuterium-tritium fuel with a single 500-trillion-Watt laser beam. This is a big number; about 1,000 times the power consumption of the United States.

This gargantuan short-lived laser pulse causes the fuel pellet to collapse and detonate, producing a mini-star for a fraction of a second.

The Z-machine takes a different approach, channelling half a trillion Watts through a spider's web of hair-thin wires surrounding the fuel pellet. The result is much the same: a big crunch known as a Z-pinch and the birth of a star.

If a steady stream of mini-stars can be created, then a power station could be constructed. The Z-machine has already achieved fusion in a test run, and NIF hopes to follow in its footsteps in 2010. The challenge will then be to smooth the rough edges of the technology in order to mass-produce economically viable, reliable power stations.

This is no mean feat, but there seems to be no fundamental reason to doubt that it is possible.

When fusion is mentioned, a common reaction in some circles is to say, "It's always 30 years away, so let's not invest too heavily".

In fact, the fusion engineers of 2009 are speaking of building the final generation of experimental reactors now.

If they succeed, Iter and her sisters should be capable of putting electricity on to the grid some time in the early 2030s. This long-term and final solution to the energy crisis depends of course on sustained public investment at current or preferably significantly increased levels.

This is a challenge that I believe we must confront now, and not tomorrow. At some point in the future, we will generate our power by nuclear fusion; there is simply no other way to deliver the trillions of watts needed to make life comfortable for all the citizens of our planet.

To this statement nobody objects. The question is therefore not "if" but "when", and it is my view that the "30 years away" argument simply doesn't wash.

John F Kennedy used to tell a story about a French general who asked his gardener to plant a tree. "What's the rush?" replied the gardener. "It will take 30 years to grow."

The general looked him in the eye, and said in an urgent tone: "Thirty years? Then you had better plant it immediately."

Professor Brian Cox is affiliated to Manchester University's high energy physics group

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/7891787.stm

Published: 2009/02/16 12:41:15 GMT

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