
(NEWSER) – You may not consider yourself a heavy drinker, but even a relatively small amount of alcohol seems to raise the risk of death from cancer, a study finds. Researchers found that having a drink and a half or less per day was associated with 7,000 of the 19,500 annual booze-linked cancer deaths, NBC News reports.
The US sees some 577,000 cancer deaths each year, which means 3.5% of those are related to alcohol, the study notes. To put the figure in perspective, 14,000 people died from ovarian cancer in 2009; 9,000 died from melanoma that same year.