Very interesting results from a recent update of the ongoing and very long-term Nurses’ Health Study, which has in fact been going on for so long that it’s entered another stage in which the researchers are now evaluating the daughters and grand-daughters of the original study participants, so the study is now called Nurses’ Health Study II.

We’ve learned from several previous studies that the more alcohol a woman consumes over her lifetime, the higher her risk of breast cancer, but in this latest update the researchers were interested in the risk of benign breast disease (BBD) in the young women in the current study, and especially in the role that alcohol intake might play in developing BBD.

And what they concluded is that if a young woman (between age 18 and 27) has a mother or even an aunt who has had breast cancer, that young woman is more than twice as likely to be diagnosed with benign breast disease compared to a young woman without any family history of breast cancer.

As well, any young woman whose mother has been diagnosed with BBD is twice as likely to develop benign breast disease herself compared to a young woman with no BBD in the family.

But they also found that alcohol seems to play a significant role in determining a woman’s risk for BBD.

Thus, any young woman whose mother, grand-mother, or aunt had breast cancer was significantly more likely to develop BBD if she – the young woman – drank alcohol regularly, and the more alcohol that young woman consumed, the higher her risk for BBD.

On the all-present other hand, however, young women without any history of breast cancer in the family were at no raised risk of developing BBD linked to alcohol intake.

Bottom line: alcohol seems to play a significant role in many women’s risk for breast disease, both benign breast disease and breast cancer, so every woman should take that into consideration when she decides to drink – especially about how much she takes in.