Emotional distress can raise your risk of dying from cancer by a third.
Up to one in ten people in the UK will battle anxiety or depression at some point, and this raises the danger of death from bowel, prostate and pancreatic cancer, research now suggests. This may be because depression makes sufferers more likely to smoke and drink, and less likely to take exercise. But even accounting for this, anxious and depressed people die in greater numbers from cancer thought to show that their unhappiness damages the body’s defense systems against the disease.
The authors of the study, from University College London, Edinburgh University, and the University of Sydney in Australia, suggest emotional distress may hit immune function and damage DNA repair. It can also put people off from attending screenings which could spot cancer early, or prevent them seeking proper treatment when they do fall ill. The review of 16 studies published in the British Medical Journal looked at more than 163,000 people in the UK.
The study found those with anxiety and depression had a 32 per cent greater risk of dying from all types of cancer. This was true even after taking into account age, sex, education, weight and regardless of whether people smoked and drank.
Lead author Dr David Batty, from University College London, said: ‘After statistical control for these factors, the results show that compared with people in the least distressed group, death rates in the most distressed group were consistently higher for cancer of the bowel, prostate, pancreas, and oesophagus and for leukaemia.’
The people studied were followed for almost a decade and given questionnaires to judge if they were anxious or depressed. Their mental wellbeing was found to be as important as obesity or smoking in raising their danger of dying from some cancers.
The fact that people who are anxious often stop looking after themselves could also help explain their higher risk of death from bowel, pancreatic and gullet cancers. These are all cancers which can be made worse by over-eating or failing to exercise.
Prostate cancer, another cancer with higher death rates among those with emotional distress, is a hormone-related cancer. This may be caused by symptoms of depression which cause spikes in the stress hormone cortisol restraining DNA repair and harming the immune response which can ward off cancer.
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These physical effects could raise the risk of all types of cancer by striking at the body’s natural defenses. However, Dr Batty added: ‘Our findings contribute to the evidence that poor mental health might have some predictive capacity for certain physical diseases but we are a long way off from knowing if these relationships are truly causal.’
The size of bowel tumours can be significantly reduced by leaving a longer gap between chemoradiotherapy and surgery, according to research. Experts found an additional five weeks of recovery before surgery saw the cancer shrink a further 24 per cent.