Alcohol consumption and mammographic density in a multiethnic population

Abstract

This report examined the association between alcohol intake and breast cancer risk as assessed by mammographic densities in a multiethnic population. Information for this analysis was available from 2 previous investigations: a nutritional intervention study (The Breast, Estrogens, and Nutrition Study; BEAN) with 217 premenopausal women and a nested case-control study within The Multiethnic Cohort (MEC) with 1,250 primarily postmenopausal women. On the basis of self-reported alcohol intake from a validated food frequency questionnaire, women were categorized into abstainers (<1 drink/month), low (<1 drink/day) and high (>or=1 drink/day) alcohol consumers. On average, 3 mammograms were available per woman. Using mixed models, we calculated mean percent densities for each alcohol consumption category while adjusting for covariates. Mean alcohol intakes for women in the BEAN study and for cases and controls in the MEC study were 2.0, 2.7 and 1.8 drinks/week, respectively. Overall, the difference in densities between abstainers and the highest alcohol intake category was only 1-2% and the differences were not statistically significant. However, the difference was 3-5% for women aged 55-65 years and for breast cancer cases. In postmenopausal women without hormone replacement therapy (HRT), breast density increased by 2% for each higher alcohol intake category. Breast densities were also elevated for high alcohol consumers on estrogen-only therapy as compared to abstainers and low consumers, whereas combined HRT use was associated with higher mammographic densities independent of alcohol use. In conclusion, despite the low alcohol intake in our population, alcohol consumers had higher percent breast densities than did abstainers. The larger difference in some subgroups suggests that women with certain characteristics may be more susceptible to the influence of alcohol on breast density than others.

Alcohol intake and mammographic density in postmenopausal Norwegian women

“…There is no consistent agreement in the literature on the association between alcohol consumption and mammographic density [21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33]. Our results of no association are consistent with results from several other studies [30][31][32][33].…”

“…Some studies support a weak but significant positive association between alcohol intake and mammographic density in both pre-and postmenopausal women [21][22][23][24][25]. Other studies report a nonsignificant positive trend of increasing mammographic density with increasing intake [26][27][28][29] or a null association [30][31][32][33]. There is limited data on the association between alcohol intake, alcohol type and mammographic density.…”

Associations among Mammographic Density, Circulating Sex Hormones, and Polymorphisms in Sex Hormone Metabolism Genes in Postmenopausal Women

“…Cigarette smoking status was not associated with breast density in a univariate model but showed some evidence of an association in the multivariate analysis. Alcohol consumption was not significantly associated with breast density but rose with increasing alcohol use in line with previous publications (18). Time since stopping HRT and family history of breast cancer were not significantly associated with density in either model, but there were few women who had ever taken HRT or with a family history of breast cancer.…”

Alcohol intake from early adulthood to midlife and mammographic density

“…Our results agree with other studies that have found weak or no association between alcohol intake and breast density [17,29,16,30], which like ours reported a low average alcohol intake (average intake range of <0.1–5.35 g/day (<0.5 servings/day)) [17] or a low percentage of women consuming ≥7 drinks/week (<5%) [29]. In our study, 64% of women were current drinkers; however, only 13% consumed >7 servings/week.…”