consumers of beer, wine or liquor, and those who consumed two or three types of alcohol. Under the a priori hypothesis that the pattern of alcohol consumption of alcohol might be related to pancreatic cancer, binge alcohol consumption was assessed as frequency, volume, and duration of alcohol consumption beyond their usual drinking patterns. For analyses, we defined “binge drinking” as consumption of five or more drinks per day (70 g of alcohol), following the definition used by the United States Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System study [50, 51]. For ease of comparison, analyses of the primary measure of risk (lifetime weekly alcohol consumption) were conducted using categories from an earlier similar study of pancreatic cancer and alcohol consumption [16]. For other categories of alcohol consumption, weekly alcohol consumption was categorized into quartiles based on the frequency distribution among the controls. Because binge drinking was determined separately from usual drinking patterns, individuals who were characterized as binge drinkers were distributed across the range of quartiles of typical drinking patterns. For example, some binge drinkers who on occasion drank five or more drinks per day were included in lower quartiles of overall alcohol consumption based upon the average number of drinks typically
