Alcohol Given to Rats Speeded Up Spread of Cancer, Researchers Report

Here’s another reason not to get drunk: It might encourage the spread of cancer in your body.

Researchers gave some rats an intoxicating dose of alcohol an hour before injecting them with cancerous cells that typically spread to the lung. Three weeks later, these rats showed 10 times as many lung tumors as did rats that got alcohol 24 hours before or after the cancerous injection.

Other experiments suggested that alcohol suppressed the activity of immune system cells called natural killer cells, which normally destroy cancerous cells before they grow into tumors.

The results are preliminary, and what they mean for people is not yet clear, said researcher Anna Taylor. Not all cancers are controlled by natural killer cells, and it’s not known which cancers are under the cell’s control, she said.

If the alcohol effect happens in people, even a single drunken episode might encourage the spread of cancer if the person drank while cancer cells were roving in the bloodstream, the researchers said. Cancer may spread even before the disease is diagnosed, they noted.

Taylor is a neurobiology professor at the UCLA School of Medicine and a research scientist at the West Los Angeles Veterans Affairs Medical Center. She reports the work in the April issue of the journal Nature Medicine with colleagues in Israel and Ohio.