Science does not enjoy the certainty that people invest in it. Sensational scientific discoveries can often be wrong, said Nobel Laureate Irving Languir, not because of any fraudulent intent, but because of the heady, hopeful, self-deluded enthusiasm that suckers us all from time to time.
For example, when the National Cancer Institute predicted that one-in-eight women would get breast cancer, fear and confusion spread like wildfire among the female population. Several female colleagues told me that they looked around at friends wondering which one of the eight would be so stricken. However a careful analysis of the data, when age was factored in, revealed that the true incidence of breast cancer was not one in eight but one in 1,000. As a matter of fact, only 20 percent of all breast cancers appear before age 50. Nonetheless, the psychological damage was done. Even my female colleagues, who were aware of the true statistics, found themselves cowed and uneasy. Fear has always overridden reason.
Statistics become even more confusing when a government agency such as the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), with a 1999 funding level of $260 million, is ambivalent. For example, NIAAA reported a relation between drinking alcohol beverages and breast cancer in women. On one hand, NIAAA reported that women who drink moderately are 50 percent more likely to develop breast cancer than women who don't drink at all. On the other hand, it conceded that other studies do not concur with this finding, reporting that the risk of breast cancer is only weakly associated with moderate drinking.
Over the past decade, the relation of alcohol consumption to the risk of breast cancer has been studied extensively. A prospective population-based study among two generations of Framingham, Mass., women shows that the light-to-moderate consumption of alcohol, or any type of alcoholic beverage, is not associated with an increase in the risk of breast cancer.
In spite of these findings, there seems to be a persistent movement afoot to frighten women away from the pleasure and benefits of drinking by concocting a biological mechanism to link consumption to the risk of breast cancer. Investigators have proposed that consumption increases the risk of breast cancer by influencing estrogen metabolism. The most recent study on the issue, "Alcohol Consumption and Risk of Breast Cancer: The Framingham Study Revisited" published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, January 1999, says that there is no basis for concluding that the moderate consumption of alcohol increases the risk of breast cancer. Moreover, the study found no difference between estrogen users and nonusers in the relation of alcohol to the risk of breast cancer.
Believe it or not, the biggest cause of cancer is old age. At the beginning of this century when life expectancy was age 47, the incidence of all cancers was unknown. At the end of this century, as life expectancy approaches age 80, the sky is the limit.
But as women begin catching up with men in all facets of life - in sports, in the military, in the professional and business world -well-meaning researchers are trying to put them back into their "secondary place." And alcohol use and statistical correlations are the mechanism.
Since the time Reverend Billy Sunday prophesied at the advent of Prohibition that society would live happily ever after when alcohol was no longer available, modern-day studies, statistics and warnings about alcohol consumption arise to put women back "where they belong." Women are being manipulated by science and statistics to heighten their greatest fear: breast cancer. The truth is that women who choose to drink moderately, in spite of the scary statistics and warnings, will do just fine.
Morris E. Chafetz, M.D., is the founding director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. His latest book is entitled: "The Tyranny of Experts."
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