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Is alcohol a risk factor for cancer development? Elizabeth Tracey reports

Several cancer societies have come out fingering alcohol consumption as a risk factor for several types of cancer, the most recent the American Association for Cancer Research. Kimmel Cancer Center director William Nelson at Johns Hopkins says he’d like to see more basic science research to nail down how alcohol and cancer might be related.

Nelson: I'm most interested at getting to the bottom of the mechanism. There's a lot of conflicting data related to the way people report how they use alcohol and the way data are collected about their health and health hazards. There are people who consume large amounts of alcohol over periods of time and damage their livers and that's a pretty clear cut relationship. When you're trying to figure out things that have population scale that are associations, we collect a lot of data there are a lot of people, there's going to be a lot of associations that aren't causal. If you have a mechanism you can ask a better question and you can tie it together.                  :33 

Nelson notes that most studies showing any health benefits to alcohol consumption have been debunked. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.