It is said that people who suffer from anxiety or depression are more likely to get cancer. It is about prolonged stress or strong pain: mourning, separation, a big disappointment, a big worry.
This is not the case, at least not according to one meta-analize carried out on over 300,000 people published in “Cancer”, which demonstrated that depression and anxiety are not linked to higher risks of the disease.
The suspicion is that depression and anxiety (both very prevalent globally) can increase the risk of getting cancer by influencing behaviors that have an impact on health, such as smoking or not doing physical activity.
Or by directly exerting some biological effects that could favor the development of cancer. Over the years, some research has supported some association between depression, anxiety and the development of cancer, but some has not.
The paper published in Cancer includes information collected by the international PSY-CA (Psychosocial Factors and Cancer Incidence) Consortium on 18 groups of people from the Netherlands, Great Britain, Norway and Canada, a total of 320,000 adults.
By crossing the data on the presence of anxiety and depression with oncological diagnoses, the authors demonstrated that there is no connection for tumors in general, for those of the breast, prostate, colorectal, nor for those directly associated with drug abuse (oral cavity, esophagus or liver ).
However, among anxious people and smokers they found a 6% increased risk of lung cancer. A low value which, according to the researchers, would be due not to psychological suffering, but to smoking, a habit difficult for anyone to abandon, but probably especially for anxious and depressed people.
For the authors, therefore, the prevention of lung cancer must still involve actions to combat smoking, not anxiety and depression, which must certainly be prevented and treated, but not to avoid cancer.
According to Lonneke A. van Tuijl, a clinical psychologist and psycho-oncologist at the Center for Health Psychology at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and the first author of the analysis, the study results “represent a relief to many cancer patients who believe that the diagnosis is attributable to previous conditions of anxiety or depression”, with associated feelings of guilt.
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2023-09-30 03:20:00
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