Alcohol consumption and incidence of pancreatic cancer

Aage Tverdal; Randi Selmer; Dag S Thelle

doi:10.1016/j.gloepi.2022.100078

Alcohol consumption and incidence of pancreatic cancer

Glob Epidemiol. 2022 Jun 20:4:100078. doi: 10.1016/j.gloepi.2022.100078. eCollection 2022 Dec.

Authors

Aage Tverdal¹, Randi Selmer¹, Dag S Thelle^{2

3}

Affiliations

¹ Norwegian Institute of Public Health, PO Box 222, Skøyen, 0213 Oslo, Norway.
² Department of Biostatistics, Institute of Basic Medical Sciences, University of Oslo, PO Box 1122, Blindern, 0317 Oslo, Norway.
³ School of Public Health and Community Medicine, Institute of Medicine, Sahlgrenska Academy at University of Gothenburg, PO Box 414, SE404 30 Göteborg, Sweden.

Abstract

Purpose: The association between alcohol consumption and pancreatic cancer is unsettled.

Methods: Altogether 243,169 men and women 20-79 years, without cancer at baseline, were followed with respect to pancreatic cancer by linkage to the Cancer Registry of Norway and the Norwegian Cause of Death Registry. They participated in a cardiovascular survey where information on alcohol consumption, smoking habits, anthropometric measures, and some biological variables were recorded. During 20 years of follow-up, 991 incident pancreatic cancers were registered. We estimated the hazard ratios with the Cox proportional hazards model, and graphed spline curves between glass-units/d of alcohol and hazard ratio of incident pancreatic cancer.

Results: The multivariable adjusted hazard per 1 glass-unit/d was 1.08 (95% confidence interval 1.02-1.15) for men and 1.04 (0.97-1.13) for women. The association between alcohol consumption and incident pancreatic cancer was present in ex- and current smokers, but the association could be ascribed to smoking habits. The multivariable adjusted spline curves increased with increasing glass-units/d and with confidence bands not encompassing 1.0 above one glass-unit/day.

Conclusion: Our findings of an association between higher level of alcohol consumption and incident pancreatic cancer, could be attributed to confounding by smoking habits.

Keywords: Alcohol; Height; Pancreatic cancer; Smoking.