Another Factor to Why I Had Cancer at 27, Not 67 Years Old

Insightful study recently published. Personally, I do not have any medical training or background of any sort, but my personal experience is worth years of study in regards to stress and breast cancer.

At the time of my diagnosis, I recently learned I was pregnant with our first child (happy stress) and I was at a new job doing new things aka trials (happy stress). All in all, I was a basket case. A few of my former coworkers still reminisce with me when I run into them. Right before one of my trials (while I was pregnant, just weeks before I was diagnosed), I became extremely lightheaded and had to lie down in the office for a few minutes to ward off fainting in front of the judge. It was pretty nerve-racking at the time, but hysterical now. I always assigned my near-fainting-before-trial-experience as a healthy dose of stress ...

This recent study may interpret my near-fainting-experience and everything else I was going through as the straw that broke the camel's back for my own diagnosis. Each morning I wake up now, I remind myself that nothing is worth stressing out that much, calm, calm and calm.

Social isolation dysregulates endocrine and behavioral stress while increasing malignant burden of spontaneous mammary tumors.Hermes GL, Delgado B, Tretiakova M, Cavigelli SA, Krausz T, Conzen SD, McClintock MK.Departments of Comparative Human Development, Institute for Mind and Biology, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA.

In a life span study, we examined how the social environment regulates naturally occurring tumor development and malignancy in genetically prone Sprague-Dawley rats. We randomly assigned this gregarious species to live either alone or in groups of five female rats. Mammary tumor burden among social isolates increased to 84 times that of age-matched controls, as did malignancy, specifically a 3.3 relative risk for ductal carcinoma in situ and invasive ductal carcinoma, the most common early breast cancers in women. Importantly, isolation did not extend ovarian function in late middle age; in fact, isolated animals were exposed to lower levels of estrogen and progesterone in the middle-age period of mammary tumor growth, with unchanged tumor estrogen and progesterone receptor status. Isolates, however, did develop significant dysregulation of corticosterone responses to everyday stressors manifest in young adulthood, months before tumor development, and persisting into old age. Among isolates, corticosterone response to an acute stressor was enhanced and recovery was markedly delayed, each associated with increased mammary tumor progression. In addition to being stressed and tumor prone, an array of behavioral measures demonstrated that socially isolated females possessed an anxious, fearful, and vigilant phenotype. Our model provides a framework for studying the interaction of social neglect with genetic risk to identify mechanisms whereby psychosocial stressors increase growth and malignancy of breast cancer.

The article also reads in part:

"Socially isolated women more prone to triple-negative Researchers at the University of Chicago have isolated another factor in triple-negative breast cancer: social isolation. They found that women living in a high crime area of Chicago are more likely to develop triple-negative, which is more prevalent among African-Americans. Loneliness and a lack of social outlets, they say, lead to a surge in the stress hormone cortisol, which allows tumor cells to grow through efficient use of sugar and fat. And sugar and fat are out to do no good—they’re both associated with aggressive cancers.Women with triple-negative also had consistently low cortisol levels, leading to a flat reaction to stress, again a result of life in a high-crime neighborhood, according to the study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.But, women with a strong social network were more likely to fight against stress, therefore having the power to combat disease."

PMID: 20018726 [PubMed - in process]

I am triple-negative. I am staying calm. Calm, calm, calm.