They say that stress triggers cancer

MCBaker

I was counting up the stresses and traumas in my life, and gave up when I reached the number ten. I had a counseling session yesterday, because depression had attacked me like the gravity of Saturn.

My sister died in a very nasty automobile accident a year ago. I have difficulty grieving, and some people perceive me as cold and tough. When I do cry, I cry alone. That is because my eyes do not produce tears. Needless to say, during Taxol I became confused. The opthamologist suggested that I have an immune disorder, the primary symptom of which is that the glands which produce tears are very underactive.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/emotional-freedom/201007/the-health-benefits-tears

This presents a problem, and the reason why I have been on antidepressants all my life, and maybe why my right breast filled with DCIS almost overnight.

I need to quit blocking my mind from thinking about events which sadden me, and go about crying in my own way; a person can cry without tears. Infrared sauna is available in this town, and it will help me detox from the chemo. If it will help me detox from the depressive chemicals, as a substitute for tears, I will continue.

Does anyone else have a story of trauma and loss in the two years before BC diagnosis?

Meow13

Mine was daily stress from my husband. Nothing I did was right constant negativity I was so stressed on a daily basis for years. I really think it contributed to my diagnosis.

MCBaker

Thanks. Yes, a marriage that turned abusive is on my list, too. This topic may develop slowly, but I think there may be many who have stories.

reflect

Years of family stress, substance abuse (son) mental health (both siblings) physical health (mom had cancer, heart attack within 6 weeks). I always felt I was headed for trouble

MCBaker

Yeah, I struggled with my son, substance abuse and other problems. He is now in a long-term mental health facility, and apparently doing well.

corgi09

I was going into a business bankruptcy after trying for years to keep it afloat after the crash.

SummerAngel

Stress is a fact of life. It's not great for us, but I don't think there's any proof it causes cancer. If it did I know many people who should have gotten it and haven't.

edwards750

Mine was our youngest son and his alcohol addiction. From age 15 to his mid-20s we were in a constant state of fear and anxiety. Those late night telephone calls that were never good news. He had a guardian angel to be sure because he had several near miss disasters. I didn’t sleep but a few hours every night for months worrying about him. Short of locking him up in his room we had to endure anguish and live in constant fear something terrible would happen to him. It nearly did. We tried everything but nothing worked until 3 years ago when he became a father. Whole new drama but definitely better than it was.

I can’t imagine it didn't have some impact on my getting the dreaded disease but to be fair my mother had BC so I was already probably predisposed to get it.

It sounds like all of us had a lot of stress in our lives. There has to be a connection.

Diane

SummerAngel

Why does there have to be a connection, Diane? Seriously, to me it's just like those going around saying that root canals cause cancer. Even anecdotally it doesn't make sense. Example: people who've been in war or lived in war zones. Do they all get cancer? A colleague just told me some stories of his military experience that made my hair stand on end. He's in his early 50's now, no cancer. Just because we may have had serious stress at some point in our lives it doesn't follow that it caused our cancer.

LoveFromPhilly

I feel like I want to be in denial that the stressors in my life played into my getting cancer. I know so many people that are incredibly stressed out and they do not have cancer.


There are many great healers and people who’ve lived stress-free lives as meditators who have gotten cancer.

In the beginning of the book, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, it begins with discussing a great monk who is being watched by his disciple, as he moved through the transitions of death. It is a very beautiful book that addresses the scary and dark places and spaces that we can enter and exit when we face our mortality. It also discusses the beautiful spaces we enter and exit and weave in and out of.

I have gone through the blame game with myself of all the reasons why I got cancer diagnosed stage 4 at age 40. Was it the inguinal hernia repair at age 28 and the titanium screws that sit inside my body? Was it the worst breakup of my life from a complete narcissist and emotionally abusive partner when I was 31? Was it the extensive hours studying medicine in grad school for 5 years? Was it due to the sexual trauma I went through in my youth from a mentally ill older cousin?

Perhaps.

Or perhaps it is all still part of the great mystery that scientists and humankind has tried so diligently to understand for centuries. We still have no definitive answer.

Until then, I must stop blaming my life and the stressors I encountered as why I have this damn disease. It doesn’t help me and it doesn’t do me any good except cause me self hatred and self loathing about the choices I made and the situations I somehow found myself in.

I believe we grow from experiencing painful experiences - we become more compassionate to ourselves and others. I am working very hard to remain compassionate to myself and not self-blame for the disease. People who have diabetes or tuberculosis or sickle cell anemia do not blame stress for their diagnoses. Why should we?

MountainMia

SummerAngel, thanks. I have NOT had a stressful couple of years, not had big significant stresses for a few years. But I have cancer. People have stress. People have cancer. There's a pretty good Venn diagram you could draw showing the overlap. But it doesn't show cause and effect.

That said, I imagine being under constant severe stress might affect one's overall health. YMMV.

MountainMia

IchangedMyName, nicely put.

MCBaker

Perhaps we are looking at genetic predisposition to develop cancer when under stress.

However, resolving some of those past griefs and stresses can improve the prognosis. Untreated depression is clearly a factor. Even if it only reduces motivation to take care of oneself.

AliceBastable

I'll leave the finding of causes of cancer to the researchers with the education and experience to tackle it. Otherwise, it's just a bear-scarer*.

*I worked with a guy in college 50 years ago. He always wore a leather band on his wrist - before it was common for men to wear jewelry. When I asked him about it, he explained that it was a bear-scarer. When I looked puzzled, he said, (with a big smile) "Well, you don't see any bears around, do you?"

ALWAYS apply the bear-scarer test to spurious claims of cause and effect.

wrenn

If stress caused cancer every living person would have cancer. Stress is unavoidable.

I am ok with the theory that sustained stress might tax immune function or health in general but I don't find the claim that cancer is caused by stress very useful. I don't see how believing that helps. When I feel like a victim I have a really shitty day. :-)

MCBaker

Have you come into contact with Ty and Charlene's series on on cancer treatments? Most of it is way out there, but I decided to watch it and sort out the good from the trash. Acupuncture, IV vitamin C, herbal medicine, and other treatments that many traditional doctors reject.

Precancerous cells are everywhere, but can mutate into invasive cancer at any time. So one can say that everyone has cancer.

My non-prescription meds are glucosamine and chondroitin, turmeric, b-complex, and fish oil, vitamin c, and acetaminophen. I am sorting through these, and wondering if that is what meets my needs. My onco approves of saunas.

I believe that if I work through the many griefs in my life, my physical health will get better. I have relied on anti-depressants, because of trust issues. I agree with you, wrenn. Stress does cause illness, and people under stress often get sick. People who are sick and under stress have problems recovering. Cancer, in itself, is a stressor, and requires the individual to adapt psychologically and spiritually.

If I feel like I have been a victim, that motivates me to understand why I have been victimized, and learn to avoid being victimized again.

pupmom

Cancer is a genetic mutation. I have never seen a study proving, or even hypothesising, that stress can cause a genetic mutation.

Meow13

https://www.mdanderson.org/publications/focused-on...

edwards750

Good grief I just mentioned there could very well be a connection I didn’t intend to state it was a definite cause or result. How would I know or any of you for that matter? All this backlash was uncalled for. Of course everyone has stress that’s a given. There was no need to take me to task for having an opinion. I’m entitled to have one just as everyone else but at the very least be civil.

Diane

rmgrmg

Yeah, Meo, got too much stress is not a good thing, ever. Thanks for post on stress

MCBaker

I had the feeling it was a factor. Good research skills, Meow!!

hapa

great article Meow. My dad died from cancer about a year before I was diagnosed. I had quit my job and moved out there to help him and my mom but he went into the hospital a week after I got there and died two weeks after that. Moved and started a new job a couple weeks after the funeral, which was delayed due to the holidays. My husband and I were long distance during all of this. It was a super stressful time

TB90

We can all find a study to support anything. Stress definitely has an impact on our health. Stress cannot be measured scientifically. It is self reported as is alcohol use, etc. Studies to prove otherwise are unethical. We cannot create stress or encourage alcohol, except perhaps in rats. Stress in war torn countries goes beyond anything we can even imagine. They should be riddled with breast cancer. Stats do not support this. Perhaps it is the self medication North Americans use to treat their stress (ie alcohol) that affects stats. I agree that there is no definitive cause and effect involving stress. But stress affects everything from our diet to lack of sleep and exercise, etc. No way this is healthy. Reducing stress will have a positive impact on your health. And if you cannotget out of the stressful situation, leading the healthiest lifestyle your can may negate the impact. Never feel helpless to your situation. Stress is a given. Stressing about stress is so defeating and of no value whatsoever. Just lead the best life you ca

Misha13

Everyone has said many thoughtful things on this subject! My two cents is that in the months prior to my diagnosis, our son got sick was in the ICU for 3 months plus two more months of a rehab hospital. This was Hell. Didn’t know for sure what was wrong, didn’t know when it would end, if he would die, literal Hell.

People talk about having PTSD from cancer treatment, I have PTSD from those five months. Causation does not imply correlation, but I have no doubt that chronic, severe stress damaged my body chemistry and immune system. I’m not blaming it, it happened and I accept it, but something shifted in my body during that time. Just as I feel a different kind of shift, now, that I am cancer-free.

Hugs and blessings to all!

Wildplaces

Misha - I hope yourson is doing well. It is good to hear that you feel well!

I hesitate to post on this because the notion that stress and disease are related makes many, myself included, oddly uneasy.

From the outset there is a difference between stressor and our physiological response to stress which is OUT of our control in almost all circumstances.

For a given stressor there are a wide variety of physiological responses within a given population, some of these vary with social and cultural expectations, resources, and some with resilience which is usually a mix of inherited and acquired traits/capacity to access resources, accept change.

We are starting to be able to measure response to stress - at least in the acute phase - blood pressure, heart rate, respiaratory rate, serum cortisol and disturbance of circadian rhythm, but there is work in the long term as well. Probably the most important piece of information from teams that work under high stress, is that one can not control the stress response (apart from deep slow breathing which has some effect in the short time, used also by army special forces - wait for this, they can not call it yoga, so its tactical breathing) - there is no self blame, literally you can not manage your cortisol level.

There is good epidemiological data showing that stress modulates chronic illness, cancer included.

Shift workers for example are more likely to get cancer, and this is cortisol and circadian rhythm related.

It is not so much that one stressful event means that you will have BC, but repeated poorly managed stressor responses or overwhelming stresor over time may affect when and how you present with cancer. However this is not a popular topic or one that many want to address or publish on.

There is a landmark study 2001 Finnland - cohort of 10,000 plus women followed for 25 years - it was positive for the relationship between stress and BC - not when adressing daily stressful events but when looking at major life events such as - divorce, death etc.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/1...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12615606

Again recent systematic review of over 52 studies found the relationship to be positive.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC58082...

Hugs to all,

🙂🐣🌷

.

santabarbarian

I think its pretty clear that excessive, unremitting stress is damaging to health-- look at the ACEs study, about trauma in childhood affecting lifetime health in many domains, including cancer. So is horrible eating. Yet if you try to talk about either stress or bad diet, some people get very defensive. Nobody wants to feel they contributed to their own cancer, and everyone knows someone who lives on PopTarts who is cancer free, and sometimes the more relevant factor is a chemical exposure or a bad gene... But OBVIOUSLY things like diet, stress, sleep, and other physiological "inputs" can be either less or more conducive to health. It may not be a 1:1 correlation, but it is definitely relevant.

MCBaker

And I look at all the long-term serious stressors in my life, and I am lucky that it happened this late. My sister's death was the last straw.

For years I have had PTSD dreams that seriously interfered with my sleep. Again.......

MelissaDallas

I don’t believe there are many people who have not endured agony and tragedies and major stressors in their lives. All of them don’t talk about it. In this respect most of us are probably in no way unique

LoveFromPhilly

here’s my thoughts at this moment:

Statistics say 1 out of 8 women develop breast cancer

1 out of 8!!!

And that has gone DOWN over the last 15 years or so as the decline in HRT has gone down

One major question here that is causing me a lot of rage:

1) why do women with breast cancer get constantly blamed for their stress as a cause of cancer while we don’t see children with cancer, animals with cancer, men with prostate cancer or lymphoma or pancreatic cancers or testicular cancer for that matter (!!) get blamed for their stress causing their cancer?? This is ridiculous! To me this is another way to categorize women as “hysterical” and emotionally unstable.

I looked at the epidemiological studies that someone posted and they all are still “inconclusive” if you actually read them. The authors are trying to make a correlation but there’s too many factors to be able to do so.

As far as the ACE epidemiological study, this study has been taken completely out of context. It is completely inaccurate to use this study to make a blanket statement that says that childhood trauma causes cancer. This was not the purpose of this study nor is it what the study actual says.

pupmom

IchangedMyName, thank you! This conversation reminds me of "studies" decades ago, which claimed that negative thoughts caused cancer, and only by reversing those thoughts could one beat the disease. Part of the treatment involved visualizing one's immune system destroying the cancer cells. If that didn't work, the patients were blamed for their negativity. I hate to think how many people died with that last thought in their minds.

santabarbarian

Ichangedmyname,

High ACEs absolutely DO correlate with higher incidence of cancer later in life.... also higher obesity, diabetes, etc-- all of which may be part of the cancer connection. Not ALL cancer needs be caused by ACEs for ACE's to be a contributing factor like, say, smoking or nitrates.

Nobody saying ALL cancer is caused by smoking or nitrates of childhood trauma... rather that all of these assaults on health contribute.