Women Affairs

Reuter Three or more drinks a day, whether beer, wine or spirits, boost a woman's risk of breast cancer as much as smoking a pack of cigarettes, US researchers say. The relationship between alcohol and breast cancer is known but there has been little data on whether the choice of drink made a difference, they told a European cancer conference in Barcelona. In what the researchers said was one of the largest studies to investigate links between breast cancer and alcohol - found that alcohol itself and the amount a person consumed were key rather than the type of drink. "Studies have consistently linked drinking alcohol to an increased risk of female breast cancer, but until now there has been little data, most of it conflicting, about an independent role played by the choice of beverage type," Arthur Klatsky of Kaiser Permanente in California and one of the researchers said. Breast cancer is the second most common cancer killer of women, after lung cancer. It will be diagn...