A new study shows that women who routinely have even small amounts of alcohol, as few as three drinks a week, have an elevated risk of breast cancer.

The research, which looked at the habits of more than 100,000 women over 30 years, adds to a long line of studies linking alcohol consumption of any kind -- beer, wine or spirits -- to an increased risk of breast cancer. But until now the bulk of the research focused on higher levels of alcohol intake. The latest study is among the first to assess the effect of relatively small amounts of alcohol over long periods.

The rise in cancer risk associated with three to six drinks a week, though, was modest, and for many women it may not be enough to outweigh the heart-healthy benefits of drinking in moderation.

Among the factors women will have to consider, experts say, are family history of heart disease and cancer, as well as their use of hormone therapies such as estrogen. Alcohol may increase the risk of breast cancer in part by raising a woman's levels of estrogen.

"We're not recommending that women stop drinking altogether," said Dr. Wendy Chen, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and the lead author of the study.

Chen and her colleagues looked at 105,986 women enrolled in the Nurses' Health Study, which has followed the habits, health and lifestyles of nurses in the United States for several decades. The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that having 5 to 10 grams of alcohol a day, the equivalent of three to six glasses of wine a week, raised a woman's risk of breast cancer by 15 percent. That translates into only a very small risk. A typical 50-year-old woman, for example, has a five-year breast cancer risk of about 3 percent; so a 15 percent increase would boost that risk only to 3.45 percent.

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RED WINE COMPOUND GETS MORE BUZZ

A compound in red wine suspected of offering a host of health benefits has for the first time shown promise in a study testing the compound in people, researchers reported Tuesday.

The small but intensive study involving 11 obese but healthy men found that taking a relatively low dose of resveratrol daily for a month produced a variety of fundamental beneficial effects on their metabolism.

"We are very excited," said Patrick Schrauwen of Maastricht University in the Netherlands, whose research was posted online by the journal Cell Metabolism.

Resveratrol appeared to produce all the same effects in the human subjects as it had in animals, such as lowering the metabolic rate, cutting the accumulation of fat in the liver and reducing blood sugar. There were no apparent side effects.

A SPURT IN DEATHS FROM PAINKILLERS

The number of overdose deaths from powerful painkillers more than tripled over a decade, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta reported.

Prescription painkillers such as OxyContin, Vicodin and methadone led to the deaths of almost 15,000 people in 2008. That's more than three times the 4,000 deaths in 1999. The report also showed nearly 5 percent of Americans ages 12 and older said that they had abused painkillers in the past year.