Fifty-eight percent of US adults know that regularly drinking alcohol increases the chance of later developing cancer, up five percentage points since February, according to a national survey released October 27 by the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) of the University of Pennsylvania. The rise, which the center describes as statistically significant, returns awareness to roughly the level recorded a month after the US Surgeon General’s January 2025 advisory on alcohol and cancer.
The finding comes from the 31st wave of the Annenberg Science and Public Health (ASAPH) survey, fielded September 22 to October 5, 2026 by the research firm SSRS among 1,842 adults drawn from a nationally representative probability panel and interviewed online and by telephone. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.2 percentage points. The remaining 42% of respondents do not recognize the link: 24% say they are not sure whether alcohol affects cancer risk and 17% incorrectly believe it has no effect.
APPC first asked the question in September 2024, when 40% of adults knew of the link, according to the center’s earlier reporting. Awareness jumped to 56% in February 2025, a month after then Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory describing a causal link between alcohol and at least seven cancers, including breast, colon and liver cancer, and calling for updated warning labels on alcohol containers. It then slipped to 53% in February 2026, a change APPC said was not statistically significant, before recovering to 58% in the new survey.
The center points to developments since the spring. In September 2026, researchers at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine published data in The Lancet suggesting that even small and moderate amounts of alcohol raise cancer risk, prompting news coverage that included reports that alcohol-related cancer deaths in the United States had more than doubled over three decades. APPC research analyst Laura A. Gibson said the survey cannot establish a direct link between that coverage, or the earlier advisory, and the rise in knowledge, but added: “We know that ongoing media coverage plays an important role in amplifying the general public’s awareness of health risks.”
Why it matters
The survey lands in a changed policy environment. The 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, released by the US Department of Agriculture on January 7, 2026, advise limiting alcoholic beverages for better health but, unlike the 2020–2025 edition, do not mention cancer. The previous guidelines had warned that alcohol raises cancer risk even at less than one drink a day, according to APPC’s March 2026 analysis. At that time Kathleen Hall Jamieson, then the center’s director, said the omission meant “the USDA turned its back on a substantial body of research,” and that “A clear, strong statement in the dietary guidelines could have amplified that impact – and helped to save lives.”
For clinicians and public health agencies, the numbers suggest that knowledge of a well-established cancer risk factor remains far from universal: more than four in ten adults either do not know or hold an incorrect belief. The trajectory across the four surveys also illustrates how awareness can rise sharply after a high-profile federal communication and then drift without reinforcement, which is relevant to debates over warning labels and over what federal guidance should say.
The caveats
This is a survey of self-reported knowledge, not of drinking behavior, and the October release does not report breakdowns by age, sex or drinking status. Changes between waves should be read against the roughly three-point margin of error on each estimate, and APPC’s own analysts caution that the survey cannot attribute the rebound to any specific cause. The findings are published by the center rather than in a peer-reviewed journal; APPC links to its topline results and methodology report. The survey team includes Gibson, managing director of survey research Ken Winneg, Patrick E. Jamieson of the Annenberg Health and Risk Communication Institute, research analyst Shawn Patterson Jr. and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, now director emeritus.
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