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Alcohol Consumption and the Risk for Prostate Cancer in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition

¹ Division of Cancer Epidemiology, German Cancer Research Centre, Heidelberg, Germany; ² Cancer Research UK Epidemiology Unit, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; ³ Department of Clinical Epidemiology, Aalborg Hospital, Aarhus University Hospital, Aarhus, Denmark; ⁴ Institute of Cancer Epidemiology, Danish Cancer Society, Copenhagen, Denmark; ⁵ Department of Epidemiology, German Institute of Human Nutrition, Potsdam-Rehbrücke, Germany; ⁶ Department of Hygiene and Epidemiology, University of Athens Medical School, Athens, Greece; ⁷ Department of Epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; ⁸ Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; ⁹ Nutritional Epidemiology Unit, Italian National Cancer Institute, Milan, Italy; ¹⁰ Department of Biomedical Science and Human Oncology, Centro per la Prevenzione Oncologica Piemonte, Turin, Italy; ¹¹ Molecular and Nutritional Epidemiology Unit, Centro per lo Studio e la Prevenzione Oncologica-Scientific Institute of Tuscany, Florence, Italy; ¹² Cancer Registry, Azienda, Ospedaliera "Civile M.P. Arezzo," Ragusa, Italy; ¹³ National Institute of Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, The Netherlands; ¹⁴ Department of Epidemiology, Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; ¹⁵ Department of Health of the Basque Government, Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, San Sebastian, Spain; ¹⁶ Epidemiology Department, Murcia Health Authority, Murcia, Spain; ¹⁷ Centro de Investigación Biomédica en red en Epidemiología y Salud Pública, Barcelona, Spain; ¹⁸ Public Health Institute of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain; ¹⁹ Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; ²⁰ Andalusian School of Public Health, University of Granada, Granada, Spain; ²¹ Departments of Public Health and Clinical Medicine and ²² Surgery and Perioperative Sciences, Urology and Andrology, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden; ²³ Department of Surgery, Malmö University Hospital, Malmö, Sweden; ²⁴ Department of Clinical Sciences, Lund University, Lund, Sweden; ²⁵ Medical Research Council Dunn Human Nutrition Unit; ²⁶ Department of Public Health and Primary Care, Institute of Public Health, University of Cambridge School of Clinical Medicine, Cambridge, United Kingdom; ²⁷ IARC, Lyon, France; and ²⁸ Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom

Requests for reprints: Sabine Rohrmann, Division of Cancer Epidemiology (C020), Im Neuenheimer Feld 280, 69120 Heidelberg, Germany. Phone: 49-6221-422204; Fax: 49-6221-422203. E-mail: s.rohrmann{at}dkfz.de

Alcohol is a risk factor for several types of cancer. However, the results for prostate cancer have been inconsistent, with most studies showing no association. Within the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition, detailed information were collected from 142,607 male participants on the intake of alcoholic beverages at recruitment (for 100% of the cohort) and over lifetime (for 76% of the cohort) between 1992 and 2000. During a median follow-up of 8.7 years, 2,655 prostate cancer cases were observed. Multivariate Cox proportional hazard models were used to examine the association of alcohol consumption at recruitment and average lifetime alcohol consumption with prostate cancer adjusted for age, center, smoking, height, weight, physical activity, and nonalcohol energy intake. Overall, neither alcohol consumption at baseline nor average lifetime alcohol consumption was associated with the risk for prostate cancer in this cohort of men. Men who consumed 60 g alcohol per day had a relative risk of 0.88 [95% confidence interval (95% CI) 0.72-1.08] compared with men with an intake of 0.1-4.9 g/d; the respective relative risk for average lifetime intake was 1.09 (95% CI, 0.86-1.39). For advanced prostate cancer (n = 537), the relative risks for 60 and 0.1-4.9 g alcohol per day at baseline were 0.98 (95% CI, 0.66-1.44) and 1.28 (95% CI, 0.79-2-07), respectively, for average lifetime intake. No statistically significant association was observed for alcohol intake from specific alcoholic beverages. Our results indicate no association between the consumption of alcohol and prostate cancer in this cohort of European men. (Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2008;17(5):1282–7)