Alcohol linked to more cancers than thought, study finds | Hacker News Reader

Alcohol linked to more cancers than thought, study finds

theguardian.com

60 pointsjonkratz9 comments

Here is the link to the paper about the study in the Lancet.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Here is the press release by Imperial College about the study.

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/187871/there-safe-level-alco...

I also looked for the original article but we claim to have found different original sources! The press release you linked is from 2018, so I don't think that is referring to the same research as the Guardian article is.

Why does this article not share a link to the actual study?

Newspapers almost never do this. It's probably a way to remain relevant, otherwise you can just skip the middle man.

Except the middle man can actually serve a purpose here. I would actually like someone to distill highly academic articles full of technical jargon into layman's terms that I can skim in a few minutes. The fact they don't link the original paper is just bad journalism.

It's also bad journalism when newspapers frequently misunderstand the original source completely or sensationalize one piece of the source completely out of context for extra clicks. But, there's not much we can do about that.

I hope we get more alternative media sources like Two Minute Papers (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbfYPyITQ-7l4upoX8nvctg), who actually understand the subject matter, summarizing the latest research in various fields.

Here you go:

An umbrella review of the evidence associating diet and cancer risk at 11 anatomical sites

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24861-8

How many doses of alcohol were the study participants consuming daily?

Also, what is the risk in years of life lost? An average loss of 2 weeks of life for drinking vs non-drinking is in the "why should I care" category.

Simply reporting that there is a risk does nothing to help people make decisions.

The Guardian article appears to be reporting on this open access article in Nature Communications [0].

The original publication is a meta-analysis of 860 meta-analyses. I thought this sounded a bit extreme, so I checked what John P.A. Ioannidis thought about meta-analyses because he often raises good points about trends in research and research ethics. Sure enough, his view is that meta-analyses are mass produced, redundant, misleading, and conflicted [1]!

One criticism of meta-analyses there, using anti-depressants as a case study: "the results of several meta‐analytic evaluations that addressed the effectiveness of and/or tolerability for diverse antidepressants showed that their ranking of antidepressants was markedly different. These studies had been conducted by some of the best meta‐analysts in the world, all of them researchers with major contributions in the methods of meta‐analysis and extremely experienced in its conduct. However, among 12 considered drugs, paroxetine ranked anywhere from first to tenth best and sertraline ranked anywhere from second to tenth best."

I would be reluctant to trust an observational study that examined the links between alcohol and cancer without examining the data further (many things can affect cancer, many "significant" results have small effect sizes, etc.). But to find that meta-analyses on the same topic don't reach the same conclusion? That's troubling. Is going even deeper into a meta-analysis of meta-analyses a good idea?

Edit: To justify my link is the correct original research, since another commenter claims otherwise, the Guardian article states "The Imperial study looked at data from 860 reviews of published studies, which explored the association between food and nutrient intake and the risk of either developing or dying from 11 different cancers." These same numbers of 11 cancers and 860 reviews is in [0].

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24861-8 [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27620683/

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