Talk:Alcohol and breast cancer

Old studies
I sorted out these studies below, because they are pretty old. I think we should rely more on the more recent studies with the 17,647 nurses and the 1,280,000 middle-aged British women. Mikael Häggström (talk) 15:27, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

The cites in this page are still rather old, many are of studies more than 15 years old, very few are to meta-analysis, and quite a number are to newspaper articles or reports from charities/agencies who are not disinterested scientists. (ProfByronSharp (talk) 06:55, 5 February 2016 (UTC)).

Incidence not mortality
I note that this page largely talks about "breast cancer" without distinguishing between incidence/diagnosis and mortality. This is misleading, few readers will realise this and will assume that the relationships reported between alcohol and fatal cancer when a large proportion of breast cancer diagnoses do not result in death. Breast cancer screening benefit is still controversial because screening does not reduce mortality (Cochrane review) but raises incidence, so it would be possible to write a similar page as this one (but on screening not alcohol) suggesting that screening caused cancer - which would be as misleading as this page is. This page should therefore should focus on the correlation between alcohol consumption and mortality in population studies - this will give readers a better appreciation of the potential risk of alcohol consumption. (ProfByronSharp (talk) 06:55, 5 February 2016 (UTC))

Weeding
I weeded out a bunch of old sources (1990s? Really?) and primary sources. I find it interesting that two primary studies were repeatedly mentioned as proving that drinking doesn't cause breast cancer or affect the outcomes, since one recent review says that they analyzed a pile of sources, and only two of them came to that conclusion. (I didn't check to see whether it was the same two.)

The main message from this article should be: Less alcohol means less breast cancer, full stop. The science is clear now (much clearer than it was 20 years ago), and there should be no weaseling on that point any more. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:43, 20 June 2018 (UTC)