Our results have demonstrated that heavy alcohol consumption and binge drinking were associated with increased risk estimates for pancreatic cancer in men but not among women. Our data further suggested that either binge or consistent heavy alcohol consumption was associated with persistent increased risk of pancreatic cancer regardless of the temporal proximity of consumption to pancreatic cancer diagnosis. Results from smoking-stratified analyses that suggested a possible interaction between current smoking and heavy drinking should be interpreted with caution and require further validation in larger pooled studies, particularly given that the p-interactions for these analyses were >0.3. The association between alcohol consumption and pancreatic cancer in earlier studies has been discordant, with some hospital-based [24–28, 54–59] and population-based case–control [3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 13, 14, 17, 19, 31, 60] and cohort studies [4, 7, 9, 32, 33, 38, 42, 61, 62] showing no association, and other hospital-based [29, 30] and population-based case–control [15, 16, 18] and cohort [20, 21, 34, 36, 37, 41, 63] studies suggesting increased risk. Discordant observations in the published literature may be due to small
