Grant: Cat. Gr: Alcohol research to inform health policies and interventions - Cancer

Cancer is the leading cause of death among Canadians and alcohol plays an important causal role in incidence and mortality of some cancers. About 5.5% of cancer deaths would not have occurred in the absence of alcohol use, this is over 4,400 deaths per year. In both low volume and heavy drinkers, alcohol results in a substantial number of cancer cases and deaths. Two promising alcohol policies towards reducing alcohol use and related cancer harm are minimum unit pricing (MUP) and health warning labels. An MUP, which stops the sale of very cheap ethanol, has been shown to reduce alcohol use in Scotland, Wales, Saskatchewan and BC. Labelling, focusing on the alcohol-cancer link, increases consumer knowledge that alcohol causes cancer and to may decrease per capita drinking among labelled products. We will evaluate the potential health impact of introducing MUP and cancer warning labelling as a cancer prevention strategy and the differential impacts across provinces and different SES groups. We have previously led studies evaluating the impact of MUP and product labelling on drinking and related harms; we will extend these studies to all provinces and territories, and measure the impact on cancer incidence and mortality. All analyses will be conducted by two socioeconomic dimensions: gender and household income. Household income analyses will build upon on previous work at our institute, which began to untangle the Alcohol Harms Gradient - the phenomenon that, on average, people with lower levels of income drink less but experience higher rates of alcohol-caused harms. This has important implications for alcohol policy in Canada. Tailored, jurisdiction-specific knowledge translation and exchange products will be distributed through CISUR's extensive network of federal, provincial and territorial policymakers and will leverage CISUR's community of practice network for our ongoing Canadian Alcohol Policy Evaluation (CAPE) project.