Psychological Trauma and Cancer Risk : Extreme Stress Only Slightly Raises Cancer Risk in Women

By Jennifer Warner Reviewed By Brunilda Nazario, MD

Nov. 1, 2002 -- Surviving severe emotional trauma may take its toll on your mental health, but it doesn't necessarily raise the risk for diseases like cancer. A new study shows mothers who lost a child face only a slightly higher risk of developing smoking-related cancers compared to parents who didn't experience the loss of a child.

Researchers say the findings suggest that this increased cancer risk may actually be caused by stress-induced behaviors, such as smoking, than the stress itself.

The study appears in the Nov. 15 issue of Cancer.

Although the notion that stress can increase cancer risk by impairing the body's immune system's ability to detect and fight cancers is widely held, few scientific studies have been able to back up this link. Others have suggested that stress might affect cancer risk by leading to unhealthy habits and behaviors that are known risk factors for cancer like smoking.

In this study, Danish researchers looked at cancer rates among 20,000 parents who lost a child between 1980 and 1996 and compared them with those found among a group of more than 200,000 parents who did not lose a child. Both sets of parents were followed for up to 18 years and tracked for all types of cancer.

They found that there was no significant increased risk for cancer in parents who had gone through this extreme emotional stress compared to those that had not. The only difference the study found was that mothers who had lost a child had a slightly (18%) higher overall risk of cancer than other mothers.

But once they looked closer, researchers found that the only type of cancer that had a significant link to this psychological stress among the bereaved mothers was lung cancer. No additional risk was found for breast cancer, hormone-related cancers, alcohol-related cancers or other types of cancer.

Since smoking is the major cause of lung cancer, researchers say that bereaved mothers "may have more adverse risky behaviors" that are responsible for the increased risk of lung cancer found in this study.

In addition, the study found that the age of child at death or whether or not the death was anticipated was not associated with any significant increased risk for cancer.

Source: www.intellihealth.com

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