06/13/2002 By Harvey McConnell
There is no evidence that women who have a severely stressful life experience in the year before being diagnosed with breast cancer, or the following five years, are at increased risk of recurrence of their disease.
Dr Amanda Ramirez and colleagues, Cancer Research UK London Psychological Group, Guy’s, King’s and St Thomas’s School of Medicine, London, England, said that their findings contradict an earlier study that showed severely stressful life experiences increase the risk of recurrence of breast cancer.
It is possible different study methods may explain the contradictory results. Dr Ramirez points out that some 25 to 33 percent of women diagnosed with operable breast cancer will have a recurrence within five years of diagnosis.
While axillary lymph node involvement and histological grade can influence the prognosis, women with apparently similar tumors at the time of presentation differ markedly in their disease free survival and over. all survival.
This raises the possibility that such differences in outcome may be explained by host and environmental factors, which could include psychological and social variables.
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