JUST ONE alcoholic drink a day increases a woman’s chances of getting breast cancer by 6 per cent. But smoking does not add to the risk at all.

Leading cancer experts have discovered that alcohol is responsible for 2,000 extra cases of breast cancer in Britain every year, and that a women who has five drinks a day is 30 per cent more at risk than a teetotaller.

As drinking increases, particularly among younger women, the toll is expected to rise, prompting a drink-financed group to urge the Government to run an education campaign to alert people to the dangers.

The link between breast cancer and drinking has always been difficult to establish, because women tend to drink and smoke at the same time.

But by pooling the results of more than 50 studies involving 150,000 women, the research team disentangled the effects of tobacco and alcohol. They conclude in the British Journal of Cancer that drinking does increase the risk, with almost no safety threshold. But smoking does not.

Sir Richard Doll of Oxford University, one of the authors of the study, says: “For the first time we have undertaken a study large enough and detailed enough to look at the separate effects of tobacco and alcohol reliably. When we did this we found that drinking, but not smoking, increases the risk of breast cancer." The team was able to reach this conclusion because more than 23,000 of the women in the various studies did not drink. Looking at this group separately, the researchers could see no significant difference between the breast cancer rates of smokers and non-smokers.

Moderate drinking also has benefits, including reducing the risk of heart disease. But women are less prone to heart disease than men, so working out the exact balance of advantage is difficult. Dr Gillian Reeves, another co-author, said: “It depends on a woman’s age. Before about 60, breast cancer is a more important cause of death than heart disease. After the age of 65 or so, when the risk of heart disease becomes much greater than the risk of breast cancer, the benefits of moderate drinking are more apparent.”

The reason why drinking affects breast cancer risk is unknown, but there are strong suggestions that alcohol affects the levels of the sex hormones.

Jean Coussins, director of the Portman Group, which is funded by the drinks industry, said: “This research underlines the crucial importance of 16 to 24-year-old women taking on board the sensible drinking message. The Government should be putting significant resources into a targeted public education campaign.”

The charity Breakthrough Breast Cancer said: “We have been concerned for some time about the possible relationship between alcohol and breast cancer and the study published today goes some way to confirm our fears. We would encourage people, if they do drink alcohol, to do so in moderation.”

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