How Smoking and Alcohol Increase Your Colorectal Cancer Risk
With the number of colorectal cancer deaths increasing, especially in young people, you need to know that if you smoke or drink alcohol — any amount — you are causing damage to your DNA that accumulates over time and opens the door to cancer.
Cancer is a disease in which cells in the body grow out of control. When cancer starts in the colon or rectum, it is called colorectal cancer. The colon is the large intestine or large bowel, and the rectum is the passageway that connects the colon to the anus. Sometimes abnormal growths, called polyps, form in the colon or rectum. Over time, some polyps may turn into cancer.
Tobacco, Vaping and Colon Cancer Risk
If you were asked about tobacco and cancer, you’d likely think of lung cancer. It's true that smoking cigarettes and being exposed to other people’s cigarette smoke cause almost nine of every 10 deaths from lung cancer. But tobacco use can cause cancer almost anywhere in your body, including in the colon and rectum.
Cigarette smoke contains more than 7,000 chemicals. At least 69 of these chemicals can cause cancer. Other chemicals can interfere with your body's ability to fight cancer by:
Weakening your body's immune system. This makes it harder for your body to kill cancer cells. When this happens, cancer cells can grow and spread.
Damaging or changing a cell's DNA. DNA is the cell's so-called instruction manual that controls how a cell grows and does its job. This allows a cell to begin growing out of control and create a cancer tumor.
While vaping involves a different mechanism of heating nicotine than conventional smoking, carcinogens are still being inhaled and absorbed. Long term data on vaping is not yet available because it is relatively new, with popular brands debuting in 2015. So, it remains to be seen how vapes compare to cigarettes in regard to their risk.
Smoke from other people's cigarettes, vapes, pipes or cigars — known as secondhand smoke — also causes lung cancer. When you breathe in secondhand smoke, it's like you are smoking.
How Alcohol Consumption Impacts Colorectal Health
All drinks that contain alcohol — including red and white wine, beer and liquor — increase the risk of colon and rectal cancers. Colorectal cancer is the most common alcohol-associated cancer among men.
The Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommends that adults of legal drinking age (21 years or older) choose not to drink alcohol or to drink alcohol in moderation, which is defined as two drinks or fewer a day for men and one drink or fewer a day for women.
Studies show that alcohol may increase cancer risk in several ways, including:
Alcohol can disrupt cell cycles, increase chronic inflammation and damage your DNA.
Alcohol can increase levels of hormones, including estrogen. Estrogen plays a role in breast cancer development.
The Compounding Danger of Combining Alcohol and Tobacco
The combination of alcohol and tobacco increases the risk of developing cancer of the mouth, throat, larynx and esophagus. That’s because alcohol makes it easier for the cells in your mouth to absorb cancer-causing chemicals. So, when you use both alcohol and tobacco, the alcohol increases the absorption of carcinogens from the tobacco.
In fact, for oral and pharyngeal cancers, the harms associated with using both alcohol and tobacco are multiplicative; that is, they are greater than would be expected from adding the individual harms associated with alcohol and tobacco together.
Colon Cancer Prevention: The Benefits of Quitting Today
No matter how long you have used tobacco, quitting can reduce your risk for many cancers and chronic diseases. However, a person who stops smoking after a short time decreases the risk much more than someone who stops after being a smoker for 30 years. That’s because the DNA is permanently altered in a longtime smoker, but much of that damage still can be prevented in someone who hasn’t smoked for long.
And what happens to cancer risk after you stop drinking alcohol? Studies have found that stopping alcohol consumption is associated with lower risks of oral cavity and esophageal cancers and possibly of throat, breast and colorectal cancers. It may take years for the risks of cancer to return to those of people who never drank, but stopping does reduce the risks.
In the meantime, if you develop any new symptoms, such as a change in bowel habits, blood in your stool, bloating or unexplained weight loss, talk to your doctor about a colonoscopy. Screening for colon cancer starts at age 45 in people with no family history or symptoms.
This content is not AI generated.
