Alcohol-Fueled Cancer Deaths are on the Rise in the U.S.
Summary
- Following the U.S. Surgeon General’s recent advisory on alcohol and cancer risk, Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center researchers analyzed public data to look at trends on alcohol and cancer mortality.
- The Sylvester study is the first to look at trends over time in alcohol-linked cancer mortality across the nation.
- They found that alcohol-linked cancer deaths rose in the U.S. between 1990 and 2021, especially among older men.
- Sylvester’s Chinmay Jani, M.D., will present the team’s findings at this year’s American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting.
Earlier this year, the former U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory warning Americans of the strong links between alcohol consumption and increased risk of several types of cancer. Although many of these links have been well-known among scientists for years, awareness of this connection among the general public is low.
To understand how alcohol may be fueling rates of cancer-related deaths, researchers at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, part of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, delved into data from the Global Burden of Disease database. This public dataset captures detailed disease information from around the world and estimates risk factors that likely contribute to diagnoses and deaths, including alcohol consumption. The Sylvester study is the first to look at trends over time in alcohol-linked cancer mortality across the nation.
ASCO Merit Award
The researchers looked at total cancer deaths, as well as those due to specific cancer types known to be influenced by alcohol consumption: breast, liver, colorectal, throat, voice box, mouth and esophageal cancers. They found that, between 1990 and 2021, the total number of alcohol-related cancer deaths nearly doubled in the U.S., rising from just under 12,000 deaths per year to just over 23,000. The burden is especially high in men older than 55, who saw their alcohol-linked cancer mortality rise by a bit over 1% every year between 2007 and 2021.
“That’s a big and concerning rise,” said Chinmay Jani, M.D., a Sylvester hematology and oncology fellow who led the study. Dr. Jani will present the research findings at the 2025 American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting. His abstract has also won an ASCO Merit Award. “We need to increase awareness of this link among the general population and even in the medical field. There’s a lot of awareness about, for example, tobacco and the risk of cancer. But for alcohol, that awareness isn’t there.”
Alcohol-Linked Cancer
A 2019 survey from the American Institute for Cancer Research found that, while 89% of American adults know that tobacco raises the risk of cancer, only 45% know that alcohol does as well. There are about 100,000 new cancer diagnoses related to alcohol every year in the U.S., or around 5% of all cancer cases, according to the Surgeon General’s report, and around 20,000 deaths due to alcohol-linked cancer. That’s significantly higher than the deaths caused by drunk driving every year.
The increase in alcohol-related cancer mortality rate seems to be entirely due to an increase among men. In women, both young and old, the rates have declined slightly since 1990. In men ages 20 to 54, the mortality rates increased slightly. However, the team also looked at proportions of cancer deaths due to alcohol and found that, even for cancers with declining mortality rates, the proportion due to alcohol for nearly all of them rose between 1990 and 2021, for both men and women.
Among all cancers combined, the percentage of cancer deaths likely due to alcohol consumption increased by nearly 50% between 1990 and 2021. Even if other factors, such as improved screening and treatment, are driving overall cancer deaths down, alcohol consumption is responsible for a larger percentage of cancer mortality than in the past.
The Largest Cancer Increases
Liver cancer, colorectal cancer and esophageal cancer saw the largest increases in alcohol-related mortality. Colorectal and esophageal cancers saw the largest proportional increases. The researchers also looked at trends at the state level. The District of Columbia and Texas had the highest rates of alcohol-linked cancer mortality. Utah had the lowest. State-level differences could reflect different drinking cultures in different regions, but could also be due to socioeconomic and health access differences, the researchers said.
Besides calling for an increased awareness of the link between alcohol and cancer, Dr. Jani said it will be important to further tease out the biology behind this connection. Alcohol is known to increase cancer risk through several different mechanisms, including DNA damage and altering levels of hormones. Biological differences among people may impact how alcohol consumption raises their individual risk, and further understanding these differences could eventually allow physicians to screen for patients at highest risk and tailor counseling individually.
“We hope that our study will help educate the public on the impact of alcohol on individual cancer risk, as this is a potentially modifiable factor,” said Gilberto Lopes, M.D., Sylvester’s chief of the division of medical oncology, associate director and medical director for international affairs and senior author on the study.
Tags: alcohol, ASCO 2025, breast cancer, cancer research, colorectal cancer, Dr. Gilberto Lopes, esophageal cancer, liver cancer, Newsroom, Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center