Older adults with health issues who drink at low risk levels are more likely to die of cancer when compared with people who drink only occasionally, according to a new study. Older adults who drink alcohol on a regular basis are at higher risk of dying from cancer, according to a large new study in the United Kingdom that found people with health issues or lower socioeconomic status are particularly vulnerable. The study, published in medical journal , found that among people with health problems, even those who drank at low-risk levels were more likely to die of cancer than those who only drank occasionally, while moderate-level drinkers were more likely to die from cancer and overall.
High-risk drinkers were more likely than occasional drinkers to die from cardiovascular disease, in addition to cancer and other causes. “The detrimental effects on cancer [deaths] are observed from the first drop,” Dr Rosario Ortolá, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor in the department of preventive medicine and public health at the Autonomous University of Madrid, told Euronews Health. The analysis included about 135,000 people who were aged 60 and up and enrolled in the 2006-2010 cohort of the UK Biobank — a large-scale biomedical database.
Researchers assigned each person scores based on their health risks and neighbourhood socioeconomic factors, and followed their health outcomes over time, for a median of 12.4 years. Researchers used occasional drinkers as their.