Tony Snow's cancer returns

[StrangeSox]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...7032700828.html

[NorthSideSox72]

Does anyone know if stress effects cancer stability? I ask because being the President's Press Secretary, for ANY President, has got to be one of the most stressful jobs there one can have. Add to that the increasing exposure levels as each new Administration comes in, and the job only gets worse.

 

I certainly hope Tony is able to recover, and I hope he gets away from the job for a while.

[Balta1701]

Does anyone know if stress effects cancer stability? I ask because being the President's Press Secretary, for ANY President, has got to be one of the most stressful jobs there one can have. Add to that the increasing exposure levels as each new Administration comes in, and the job only gets worse.

 

I certainly hope Tony is able to recover, and I hope he gets away from the job for a while.

Making use of The Google, this article came to the forefront. Link.

Investigators have also explored possible mechanisms, asking, for example, whether stress might suppress the immune system cells that might be needed to squelch rogue cancer cells. And they have tried to determine whether the immune system, the body's defense system, protects people from cancer in the first place.

 

What has emerged is a tenuous connection between stress, the immune system and cancer, with a surprising new insight that is changing the direction of research: it now appears that cancer cells make proteins that actually tell the immune system to let them alone and even to help them grow.

 

As for whether stress causes cancer, the question is still open.

 

"I have no idea, and nobody else does, either," said Barbara Andersen, a psychology professor at Ohio State University who studies stress reduction in cancer patients. "If somebody suggested that they know, I would question them."

 

Polly Newcomb, the head of the cancer prevention program at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, decided to ask whether stress caused breast cancer, because women seemed convinced that it did.

 

The issue came up in her epidemiologic studies of what might be causing cancer. She used trained interviewers to ask women with cancer and healthy women who served as controls about their medical histories, their environments and the medicines they were taking.

 

Then the interviewers asked the women if they had anything to add. Repeatedly, the women with cancer would turn to their interviewers and say, "Why didn't you ask me about what really caused my cancer?"

 

What really caused it, they would say, was stress. It was plausible, Dr. Newcomb reasoned. After all, stress could alter the functioning of the immune system, in turn altering susceptibility to cancer.

 

So Dr. Newcomb incorporated standard questions about stressful life events into her continuing study of nearly 1,000 women. Had family members or friends died? Had they gotten married or divorced? Had they lost a job or had they retired? Had their financial status changed? Were there stressful events not on the list that they would like to add?

 

The women did not know why the questions, incorporated as part of a longer interview, were being asked. And the interviewers did not know which women had had cancer.

 

But the results were clear: there was no association between stressful events in the previous five years and a diagnosis of breast cancer. Other studies had the same result.

...

Many large studies of cancer and stress were done in Denmark, which has national records of illnesses. One looked at the incidence of cancer in 11,380 parents whose children had cancer, surely a stressful event, Dr. Cassileth said. The parents, though, had no more cancer than members of the general population.

 

Another study looked at the cancer rate among 21,062 parents who had lost a child. There was no increase in cancer among the parents for up to 18 years afterward. A third Danish study looked at cancer rates among 19,856 parents who had a child with schizophrenia. Once again, there was no increase in cancer.

[Rex Kickass]

That really sucks and I really hope that he pulls through.