The World Health Organization released a sweeping global analysis on February 3, 2026, concluding that 37% of all new cancer cases recorded in 2022 could have been prevented. Out of 18.7 million new diagnoses that year, roughly 7.1 million were tied to modifiable risk factors, with tobacco use and alcohol consumption leading the list. The findings sharpen a long-standing public health argument: the two daily habits most strongly linked to preventable cancer are smoking and drinking.
Smoking and Drinking Top 30 Risk Factors
The research, published in Nature Medicine, evaluated 30 modifiable risk factors across 185 countries and 36 cancer types. Smoking alone contributed to 15.1% of all new cancer cases globally, making it the single largest preventable driver. Alcohol followed at 3.2%, a figure that may look modest in percentage terms but translates to hundreds of thousands of diagnoses worldwide each year. Infectious agents, including nine pathogens such as HPV and hepatitis B, accounted for 10.2% of cases, placing them between the two daily-habit risks in overall burden.
What sets the tobacco and alcohol findings apart from infections or occupational exposures is the element of individual daily behavior. Infections can be targeted through vaccination campaigns, and workplace hazards through regulation, but smoking and drinking are woven into routine social life across nearly every region. The study’s scale, drawing on the International Agency for Research on Cancer’s global cancer burden estimates across 185 countries, makes clear that these two habits are not niche concerns confined to wealthy nations. They drive preventable cancer on every continent.
Men Face a Sharply Higher Preventable Cancer Burden
One of the study’s starkest findings is the gap between men and women. Among men, 45.4% of new cancer cases in 2022 were attributable to modifiable risk factors, compared with 29.7% among women. That 15-point difference reflects higher rates of tobacco and alcohol use among men globally, as well as greater occupational exposure in industries like mining and construction. The joint analysis from the World Health Organization and IARC, summarized in a recent WHO news release, framed the overall result as “up to four in ten cancer cases worldwide could be prevented,” but the male-specific figure is closer to one in two.
Regional variation adds another layer. Among women, preventable cancers ranged from as low as 24% in North Africa and West Asia to significantly higher shares in regions where tobacco and alcohol consumption are more prevalent and where obesity and physical inactivity are rising. These disparities suggest that blanket global messaging will not be enough. Effective prevention needs to account for where consumption patterns are highest and where public health infrastructure is weakest, a tension that the WHO data highlights but does not resolve. For policymakers, the numbers underline that gender-sensitive and region-specific strategies are essential if prevention campaigns are to reach those at greatest risk rather than simply echoing in higher-income settings.
No Safe Level: What the Science Says About Alcohol and Cancer
Alcohol’s 3.2% share of global cancer cases can create a misleading impression that drinking is a minor factor. In the United States alone, the current Surgeon General advisory attributes approximately 100,000 cancer cases and 20,000 cancer deaths annually to alcohol, emphasizing that risk increases with the volume and regularity of consumption. The advisory identifies links to at least seven cancer types, including cancers of the breast, colon, liver, esophagus, and upper aerodigestive tract, and the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified alcohol drinking as carcinogenic decades ago in its IARC Monographs Volume 44. That classification has never been downgraded.
The WHO European Region has stated plainly that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption in relation to cancer risk. The biological mechanism is well established: the body metabolizes ethanol into acetaldehyde, a compound that damages DNA and proteins. This means even moderate, regular drinking carries measurable risk, a point that clashes with widespread cultural norms around casual or social alcohol use. The Nature Medicine study factored in a latency window between alcohol exposure and cancer onset, drawing on WHO Global Health Observatory data tracking average daily intake among populations aged 15 and older. The modeling accounts for the fact that cancers diagnosed in 2022 reflect drinking patterns from years or even decades earlier, underscoring that prevention efforts today will pay off only after a long delay.
Tobacco’s Outsize Role and Policy Levers
While alcohol commands growing attention, tobacco remains the dominant modifiable cause of cancer worldwide. Cigarettes and other smoked products not only expose users to dozens of carcinogens but also generate secondhand smoke that increases risk among non-smokers, particularly children and household members. The Nature Medicine analysis attributes more than one in seven new cancer cases globally to tobacco alone, and in some countries with high smoking prevalence among men, the proportion is substantially higher. These findings align with decades of evidence synthesized by national and international health agencies, including the U.S. Surgeon General, which has repeatedly concluded that there is no risk-free level of exposure to tobacco smoke.
The policy tools to reduce tobacco-related cancer are well known: higher excise taxes, comprehensive advertising bans, smoke-free public spaces, standardized packaging, and accessible cessation support. Reports cataloged in federal health publications show that when these measures are implemented together and enforced, smoking rates can fall dramatically within a decade. The WHO analysis implicitly supports this “best buys” approach by demonstrating how much of the global cancer burden still traces back to combustible products, even after years of control efforts. The challenge now is less about discovering new interventions than about extending proven policies to low- and middle-income countries, where the tobacco industry continues to expand its marketing and where health systems are least equipped to manage rising cancer caseloads.
Why the 37% Figure Deserves Skepticism and Attention
A common critique of attributable-fraction studies is that they can overstate what prevention would actually achieve in practice. Telling a population to stop smoking and drinking does not mean 37% of cancers would vanish overnight. Behavioral change is slow, uneven, and shaped by addiction, economics, and cultural context. The 37% figure represents a theoretical ceiling, not a policy guarantee. Regions with the highest preventable fractions often have the fewest resources to mount the tobacco-control and alcohol-reduction campaigns that would be needed, and structural factors such as poverty, food environments, and urban design can limit how much individuals can realistically change their behavior.
That said, dismissing the number would be a mistake. The study, backed by IARC and published in one of the world’s top medical journals, represents the most detailed country-by-country accounting of preventable cancer risk to date. It analyzed 13 occupational exposures and nine infectious agents alongside behavioral factors like diet and physical inactivity, covering 36 cancer types. The sheer breadth of the data makes it harder to wave away as an academic exercise. If even half the theoretical prevention were achieved through stronger tobacco taxes, alcohol labeling, vaccination against oncogenic viruses, and safer workplace standards, millions of future cancer cases could be averted. Communicating this evidence clearly will require trusted messengers, from clinicians and public health agencies to science journalists whose work is indexed in databases such as the NCBI literature search, and it will depend on making high-quality research more accessible through tools like free NCBI accounts that open up underlying data and reports to the public.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
