Drinking Beer May Perk Up Cancer Risk

Drinking beer is one of the world's favorite pastimes - catching up with friends or lazing around with a chilled mug of beer in hot summer months. But now you must think twice before gulping it down as a new American study has found that heavy smoking and drinking beer actually speed up the onset of pancreatic cancerdefine.

Researchers from Michigan University found that drinking, especially beer in large amount and smoking can increase a person's risk of developing pancreatic cancerdefine, which is usually detected when it reaches the later stages as early detection is often difficult.

Lead researcher, Prof. Michelle A. Anderson and colleagues evaluated 453 patients from the Pancreatic Cancer Collaborative Registry, a multi-center, international patient registry. The team noted down the subjects' smoking and drinking (or abstinence) habits along with type of alcohol and the quantity consumed by them.

The findings showed that heavy smokers were much more likely to develop pancreatic cancer seven years earlier as compared to those who did not smoke.

On the other hand, heavy drinkers especially who drank beer developed pancreatic cancer 10 years earlier than teetotaler's.

Researchers compared wine, beer and hard liquor and found that beer reduced the age of developing pancreatic cancer the most, Anderson, assistant professor of medicine at the University of Michigan said.

Prof Michelle A. Anderson said, "Beer exerts a stronger influence than hard liquor or wine in lowering the age of onset of pancreatic cancer."

The researchers found that drinking and chronic smoking combined together had no stronger effect on pancreatic risk than either of the habits alone.

Pancreatic cancer is the fourth-leading cause of cancer death in the United States. Every year nearly 30,000 individuals in the U.S. are diagnosed with this condition. The average patient lives just 3 months after diagnosis and only 10 to 15% of patients are alive a year later and fewer than 1 percent of the patients survive five years.

Early detection of pancreatic cancer is difficult as it does not cause any symptoms right away. And even when one gets the symptoms they are usually so vague that they may go unnoticed. The symptoms may include, yellowing of the skin and eyes, pain in the abdomendefine and back, weight loss and fatigue.

The pancreasdefine is secluded behind other organs, doctor generally cannot see or feel the tumors during routine exams, which is another reason why it is not detected in its early stages.

A previous study had found that smoking a pack or more a day was associated with a five to six fold increased risk of developing pancreatic cancer.