Make Hers a Double (Stranded)! by Pat Conrad MD
The South Koreans I suspect have now achieved parity with the U.S.A. in an important field, the ability to sensationalize the bleeding obvious.
According to the National Journal of Epidemiology & Infection, the National Cancer Center in Korea has discovered that consuming alcohol may lead to more persistent HPV in women. With a sample study of over 9,000 women, researchers found that current drinkers were nearly three times more likely than non-drinkers to test positive for HPV; that women who’d been drinking for five years doubled their risk of persistent HPV; that the likelihood of someone having persistent HPV increased with the number of drinks per sitting.
Researchers postulated (1) that alcohol could cause folate deficiency, which could potentially alter your DNA, a known precursor to cancer; second, they noted that nearly 10 percent of the drinkers in the study were smokers, and (2) tobacco might suppress the immune system, making it harder for the body to fight off the HPV virus.
Paging Dr. Occam! How about this for a theory: exposure to multiple viral strains increases the likelihood of mutation, increasing the chances for varied effects of said virus, and increased mutations in targeted DNA. The virus in question is transmitted sexually. Alcohol increases the chances of gettin’ busy with multiple partners, leading to an increased chance of exposing/being exposed to multiple strains of sexually transmitted, cancer-encouraging viruses.
In fairness to the researchers, maybe they screened for this. There was a standard sounding statement that “multinomial logistic analysis was performed to estimate multivariate-adjusted odds ratios (OR)”, but nowhere in the abstracts I found did it address average number of sexual partners per participant.
Am I off base here, or are we staring the obvious in the face?
Well, yeah. Drinking excessively leads to bad decisions, like having sex with multiple partners who hang out in bars. Smoking cigarettes leads to cotinine (a breakdown product of nicotine) in the cervix, encouraging growth of HPV. Immune systems are wonderful things but why challenge them with dozens of new strains of HPV every Saturday night?