When the results of the recent epidemiologic studies are considered in view of the temporal considerations above, the results are illuminating. In the study by Allen et al (Allen et al., 2009), the average time between entry into the study and the end of the study was 7.1 years, while in the case of the Li et al, it was 7–12 years (Li et al., 2010). Therefore, for the women in both studies, the breast cancers they were diagnosed with during the study must have been initiated before they enrolled in the study. Consequently, the alcohol that these women reported drinking at the beginning of the study could not have been the initiating event in the breast cancers that they were diagnosed with. Figure 1 is a simplified graphic representation of these temporal relationships.
