By Staff Reports
(Hawaii)– From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I’m Ira Dreyfuss with HHS HealthBeat.
A study indicates men who drink more have a higher risk of human papillomavirus, or HPV, infection – which can cause cancer. At the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, researcher Matthew Schabath saw this in data on more than 1,300 Florida men.
Schabath says there was some risk regardless of how much the men drank, but the heavier drinkers had a greater problem:
“We found a significantly elevated risk in only the highest alcohol intake group. In our study, those men who were in the high alcohol consumption group on average drank about 2.6 drinks a day.”
Schabath suspects alcohol’s dampening of the immune response may widen a pathway to infection.
The study in the journal Sexually Transmitted Diseases was supported by the National Institutes of Health.
Learn more at healthfinder.gov.
HHS HealthBeat is a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I’m Ira Dreyfuss.