Alcohol-Linked Cancer Deaths in the US Doubled Since 1990, Study Finds

Alcohol-attributable cancer deaths in the United States roughly doubled between 1990 and 2023, according to a new study led by researchers at the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. Using more than three decades of Global Burden of Disease data, the researchers found that annual alcohol-attributable cancer deaths rose from 11,361 in 1990 to 23,126 in 2023. The findings were presented at the 2025 American Society of Clinical Oncology Annual Meeting and published in The Lancet Regional Health – Americas.

Alcohol has long been classified as a Group 1 carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, the same category as tobacco smoke and asbestos, and has been linked to cancers of the breast, liver, esophagus, colorectum and several head and neck sites. "The most surprising finding was the breadth of alcohol's potential impact across cancer types," said Dr. Chinmay Jani, the study's corresponding author and a chief fellow in hematology and oncology at Sylvester, noting that its role in colorectal, esophageal, breast, pancreatic and prostate cancers is less well understood by the public than its link to liver cancer.

Men and adults aged 55 and older experienced the greatest overall burden, and liver cancer caused the highest alcohol-attributable death rate among older men. But among adults aged 20 to 54, the pattern shifted: colorectal cancer was the leading alcohol-attributable cause of cancer death in men and the second-leading cause in women, in both cases surpassing liver cancer, while breast cancer was the leading cause among women in that age group.

"Alcohol-related cancer risk is not limited to one disease or one group of people," said Dr. Gilberto Lopes, the study's senior author and chief of the Division of Medical Oncology at Sylvester. The researchers said public awareness of the alcohol-cancer link still lags behind awareness of other risk factors such as tobacco, even though the lowest safe dose of alcohol is not yet known.