[Music]
if you've been paying attention to any
health news lately you might have heard
that the American Society of Clinical
Oncology released an official statement
about alcohol and cancer some headlines
make it sound like everyone should just
quit drinking now if they care about
their health but it's not that extreme
and it's not really new information
basically this statement is saying that
there's growing evidence that too much
alcohol can be really bad for you in the
long term sounds pretty reasonable and
to be super clear you shouldn't panic if
you crack open a cold one with the boys
every once in a while so I just have
been looking at risk factors involved in
cancer for years and years and a
scientific statement just means that a
group of experts gathered up a bunch of
research and published an overview of it
while pointing out questions that could
use a deeper look the ASCO used decades
of cancer research data to make their
recommendations including a bunch of
meta-analysis were pooled analysis
studies these are where researchers take
results from other papers like case
studies or lab research and plug the
data into statistical models to look for
trends like in 2007 researchers found
that alcohol consumption was a
significant factor in cancers of areas
like your mouth or esophagus those
findings were backed up by a branch of
the World Health Organization in 2009
liver cancer and drinking a heavy amount
of alcohol were strongly linked in a
2014 report backed by the world Cancer
Research Fund International and in a
2017 review breast cancer risk before
menopause was found to increase by
around five percent if you have one
drink a day just to name a few
the problem is what your body does with
the alcohol once you drink it ethanol
gets processed into a molecule called
acetaldehyde and that's the stuff that
can mess with your DNA make yourselves
mutate and cause cancer research on
animals like rats and mice have backed
up this hypothesis to they were much
more likely to develop tumors if they
drank water with ethanol or acetaldehyde
and a lot of these reviews provide
evidence against excessive drinking and
binge drinking which is defined as
consuming more than four or five drinks
in a single night out no matter what
type of alcohol you are increasing your
risk but even though the statement seems
pretty clear the big picture is
complicated we're still not sure how
much alcohol consumption alone affects
cancer risk
these statistics could be influenced by
things like smoke
were even sociological factors that
affect how much people drink so the
statement also points out that there are
lots of gaps in our knowledge that only
more research can fill but for now you
know the drill like bacon or any of the
other foods that have been linked to
cancer after understanding the risks you
can just make sensible choices and live
your life now besides all this talk
about cancer I think we can all agree
that drinking too much can leave you
with one heck of a headache the next
morning and headaches just suck some of
them are mild caused by not enough sleep
or staring at a screen for too long but
others can be aggressively terrible like
migraines and with any sort of head or
face injury you might just feel like
that's worse than other kinds of pain
and this week Duke University scientists
found some evidence that any extra
distress isn't all in your head well I
mean it is it is literally in your head
because pain is signaling from your
brain the point is there could be a real
difference in how we perceive different
kinds of pain pain is produced by the
brain in response to nerves that signal
danger like if you place your hand on
something hot nerves in your hand tell
your brain yeah there's a there's a lot
of thermal energy here I don't think
this is good your brain then translates
that into a feeling that might change
your behavior like pulling your hand
away really fast the thing is there are
two main pathways for these danger
signals to get to your brain one set of
nerves that comes from your face region
and the other set comes from everywhere
else in this study the group injected
some not-so-pleasant chemicals into the
face and paws of mice to test how they
were experiencing pain in both cases and
they found that messing with the faces
of mice led to more signaling and a
cluster called the peribronchial nucleus
that's a hub of nerves that leads to
regions like the amygdala part of the
brain responsible for processing
emotions in instincts eventually it
seems like all danger signals get
processed by the peribronchial nucleus
but what stands out here is that the
researchers found evidence that some of
the nerves from the mouse phases went
directly there so the researchers think
this could be why previous studies in
humans have seen more amygdala
activation or emotional distress with
face pain than pain in other places
scientists and migraine sufferers alike
are hopeful that this discovery
we'll help expand our idea of pain to
include both sensory discomfort and
emotional suck and hopefully learning
more about that will help with better
treatments thanks for watching this
episode of scishow news if you want to
learn more about your brain have
questions about everything from
personality tests to how FM our eyes
work we have a whole channel for you
called scishow psyche it's at
youtube.com slash scishow psyche it's
doing really well people love it
including this person
[Music]
you
[Music]