US Time Series Evidence regarding Alcohol-Related Risk of Oral Cancers and Protection against Stomach Cancers: Are Higher Concentration Beverages Different?

Abstract

Autoregressive integrated moving average modeling procedures are utilized on population-level mortality rates for oral and stomach cancers in relation to per capita consumption of total alcohol, beer, wine, spirits and cigarettes to estimate long-term population-level relationships between alcohol consumption series and oral and stomach cancer mortality rates, and to determine whether higher-concentration alcoholic beverages, as represented by spirits, are more strongly related to these cancers than beer or wine. Total alcohol consumption is found to increase oral cancer rates by 3.5% per litre of ethanol. Spirits consumption is found to be the only significant predictor in multivariate models. For stomach cancers, total alcohol and especially spirits are found to be protective, with each litre of spirits associated with a 10% reduction in rates. High-concentration beverages, as represented by spirits, are found to be significant risk factors for oral cancers but potentially protective for stomach cancer.