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Alcohol intake and the risk of epithelial ovarian cancer

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Abstract

Purpose

To investigate the association between alcohol intake over the lifetime and the risk of overall, borderline, and invasive ovarian cancer.

Methods

In a population-based case–control study of 495 cases and 902 controls, conducted in Montreal, Canada, average alcohol intake over the lifetime and during specific age periods were computed from a detailed assessment of the intake of beer, red wine, white wine and spirits. Multivariable logistic regression was used to estimate odds ratios (ORs) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for the association between alcohol intake and ovarian cancer risk.

Results

For each one drink/week increment in average alcohol intake over the lifetime, the adjusted OR (95% CI) was 1.06 (1.01–1.10) for ovarian cancer overall, 1.13 (1.06–1.20) for borderline ovarian cancers and 1.02 (0.97–1.08) for invasive ovarian cancers. This pattern of association was similarly observed for alcohol intake in early (15– < 25 years), mid (25– < 40 years) and late adulthood (≥ 40 years), as well as for the intake of specific alcohol beverages over the lifetime.

Conclusions

Our results support the hypothesis that a higher alcohol intake modestly increases the risk of overall ovarian cancer, and more specifically, borderline tumours.

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Data availability

Data are available upon request.

Abbreviations

CI:

Confidence interval

DAG:

Directed acyclic graph

OR:

Odds ratio

PROVAQ:

Prevention of ovarian cancer in Quebec

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Funding

Data collection in the PROVAQ study was supported by the Canadian Cancer Society (Grant #700485); and the Cancer Research Society, the Fonds de recherché du Québec-Santé, and the Ministère de l’Économie de la Science et de l’Innovation du Québec GRePEC program (Grant #16264). The sponsors had no role in the design, data collection, data analysis, interpretation of the results, the preparation of the manuscript, or the decision to submit the manuscript for publication.

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Contributions

Conceptualization: KL, MA and AK; methodology: KL, MA, and AK; validation: KL, JA; formal analysis: KL; data curation: KL and AG; writing (original draft): KL and AK; writing (review and editing): KL, MA, AG, JA, LG, WHG and DP; resources: LG, WHG and DP; visualization: KL and AK; supervision, project administration and funding acquisition: AK.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Anita Koushik.

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The authors declare no competing interests

Ethics approval

The PROVAQ study was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the Centre de recherche du CHUM as well as the participating hospitals. This research was conducted in line with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Informed consent was obtained for all individual participants included in this study.

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L’Espérance, K., Grundy, A., Abrahamowicz, M. et al. Alcohol intake and the risk of epithelial ovarian cancer. Cancer Causes Control 34, 533–541 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10552-023-01681-3

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