Alcohol & breast cancer.

Women who drink regularly may cut their risk of breast cancer by cutting back on beer, wine, or hard liquor. That's the conclusion of researchers who pooled the data from six studies so they could keep track of more than 300,000 women for up to 11 years. The results:

* The risk of breast cancer rose by nine percent for every ten grams of alcohol (that's between three-quarters and one drink) a day.

* Women who drank two to five servings of alcohol a day had a 40 percent higher risk of breast cancer than nondrinkers. "The bottom line is that we have strong evidence that breast cancer risk increases linearly with alcohol consumption," says co-author Stephanie Smith-Warner of the Harvard School of Public Health.

Women should decide how much, if any, alcohol to drink after weighing the risks and benefits with their physicians, she adds. And that means considering not just the risk of cancer and heart disease, but traffic accidents and the risk of alcoholism.

Journal of the American Medical Association 279:535, 1998.