Miguel Bronchud: Stress and cancer are they really related?

Miguel Bronchud, Co-Founder of Regenerative Medicine Solutions, shared on LinkedIn:

”Stress and cancer- are they really related?

According to subjective clinical experience, emotional distress in patients with cancer is of course rather frequent. Unless it is adequately addressed and clinically managed it can lead to worse symptoms, poor adaptation to the treatment protocols, fatigue, anxiety and depression, sleeping troubles, sexual dysfunction and both personal and family members psychological distress. Even if the cancer disease itself is curable, personal subjective reactions can cause a person suffering and serious problems. Cancer is of course a major stressor itself (including for ‘financial reasons’); and can increase mental health issues, which, in turn, may affect cancer prognosis and perhaps increase mortality rates. Psychological stress and discomfort have also been linked to increased mortality rates . But even if stress has been linked to cancer development and incidence for decades, traditional epidemiological studies and clinical trials have yielded contradictory results. The cause versus effect relationship is hard to quantify and prove

1. Alex J Mitchell, Melissa Chan, Henna Bhatti, Marie Halton, Luigi Grassi, Christoffer Johansen, Nicholas Meader. Prevalence of depression, anxiety, and adjustment disorder in oncological, haematological, and palliative-care settings: A meta-analysis of 94 interview-based studies. Lancet Oncol. 2011;12:160–174.
2. Donghao Lu, Therese Andersson, Katja Fall, Christina M Hultman, Kamila Czene, Unnur Valdimarsdóttir, Fang Fang. Clinical diagnosis of mental disorders immediately before and after cancer diagnosis: A nationwide matched cohort study in Sweden. JAMA Oncol. 2016;2:1188–1196.
3. David Batty, Tom C Russ, Emmanuel Stamatakis, Mika Kivimäki. Psychological distress in relation to site specific cancer mortality: Pooling of unpublished data from 16 prospective cohort studies. BMJ. 2017;356:108.

Read further.

Now a recent study suggests that patients who experience poor mental health when receiving immunotherapy for lung cancer tend to have worse outcomes.

In this study of 227 people with advanced non-small-cell lung cancer, the 111 people who experienced pre existing anxiety and/or depression were less likely to respond to immune checkpoint inhibitors (47% versus 62%) and were less likely to survive over two years (47% versus 65%).

Emotional distress could be a ‘psycho-biomarker’ that predicts immunotherapy success in combination with other factors?

Read further.”

Source: Miguel Bronchud/LinkedIn