Word: cancerous
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That's the question that an international group of researchers from the U.S., Sweden and Iceland set out to answer when they launched the largest study ever to examine the specific effect of cancer diagnosis on suicide risk. Researchers analyzed data gathered between 1979 and 2004 on 342,000 men who were recently told they had prostate cancer. Compared to death rates among a similar group of men without cancer, men who received a cancer diagnosis were 90% more likely to commit suicide in the following year. (See how to prevent illness...
...prostate cancer, particularly those who had advanced disease, were also at a slightly higher risk of dying from a heart attack or another cardiovascular event within the first year. The risk was highest during the first month after diagnosis. (See "The Year in Health...
While it's intuitively true that a cancer diagnosis can cause significant psychological stress and heightened anxiety, the findings underscore the importance of addressing these consequences in the doctor's office, along with the patient's physical disease. Previous studies have shown that traumatic events - the loss of a loved one, for instance, or a natural disaster such as an earthquake - can raise a survivor's risk of a heart event. Although the authors have not directly compared these events to the impact of a cancer diagnosis, they believe the aftermath may be similar. "Any acute stress event, including...
...worth noting, however, that Mucci and her colleagues detected the increased suicide and heart risk only in men diagnosed with cancer before the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test became available in the 1980s. PSA screening allows doctors to pick up tumors at earlier stages, which makes treatment potentially more effective, less invasive and possibly less disfiguring - and makes a diagnosis of prostate cancer far less menacing. (See the top 10 medical breakthroughs...
Other important developments in prostate cancer diagnosis and treatment also occurred in the 1980s, says Dr. Nicholas Vogelzang, chair and medical director of developmental therapeutics at US Oncology, a cancer-services company. Better biopsy techniques and drug treatments emerged, making castration and use of estrogens, the most common therapies for prostate tumors, almost obsolete. Such advances may have contributed to the drop off in suicides seen in the post-PSA era. "There may be an element here of the treatment for prostate cancer that was causing excess suicide," says Vogelzang...