Question
Does drinking alcohol affect prostate health?
Answer
Yes, alcohol affects prostate health.
Alcohol consumption increases your chances of developing prostate cancer, no matter how much or how little you drink. Drinking alcohol has this same effect for lots of different types of cancers, suggesting that there is no safe level of drinking alcohol.
Alcohol and health
The Australian Alcohol Guidelines recommend that healthy adults should drink no more than 10 standard drinks a week, and no more than four standard drinks on any one day, but this level of drinking does not result in absolutely no harm from alcohol.
Heavy drinking may increase the risk of death in men who have prostate cancer, but more evidence is needed to be certain.
The evidence about alcohol’s effects on prostate enlargement (also known as benign prostatic hyperplasia or BPH) and lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) is confusing because it suggests there are benefits and problems. More research is needed to understand the effects of alcohol on BPH and LUTS. One of the problems with some studies of the health effects of alcohol is that ‘control groups’ of non-drinkers are often made up of people who have never consumed alcohol and others who have previously been drinkers but have since given up. Some of these people may have been heavy drinkers and have health problems as a consequence, which would make it seem like background rates of health problems are higher in non-drinkers than they really are. This could explain why low levels of alcohol consumption appear to be protective against disease in some studies.
Tim Moss
Healthy Male Health Content Manager
Associate Professor Tim Moss has PhD in physiology and more than 20 years’ experience as a biomedical research scientist. Tim stepped away from his successful academic career at the end of 2019, to apply his skills in turning complicated scientific and medical knowledge into information that all people can use to improve their health and wellbeing. Tim has written for crikey.com and Scientific American’s Observations blog, which is far more interesting than his authorship of over 150 academic publications. He has studied science communication at the Alan Alda Centre for Communicating Science in New York, and at the Department of Biological Engineering Communication Lab at MIT in Boston.
