cancer – day 119

So get this headline: “Happiness may protect against breast cancer, study suggests” (Telegraph.co.uk, 22 August 2008). I wonder if anyone saw that on the sidebar of my blog earlier this week. I swear, sometimes I go check my reader-facing blog screen just to see what the breast cancer headlines are, and this one really caught my eye.

The first sentence “Positive thinking and happiness may protect against the [breast cancer] disease. . .” [puh-leese, how in the heck can someone study that scientifically?? but it went on] “. . . traumatic events like divorce and bereavement may increase the chances of developing breast cancer, a research study has found.”

One interesting thing is that they focused on younger women only, between 25 and 45 and still pre-menopausal. They also said that “the impact of adverse life on cancer risk appeared to be cumulative . . . a significant effect was only seen after two or more events had occurred in a person’s life.”

But here was the kicker:

“Two or more negative life events increased the chances of the disease by 62 percent.”

So let’s see, my first life trauma occurred as an unwanted newborn luckily adopted by my parents after six or so weeks, then I had a relatively blissfully happy childhood etc. into twenties. You could say I had some traumatic events in there, a rough breakup now and again (with all due respect to how difficult the breakup with Johnny V was, after four years together, when that final breakup happened in college, but I’m not sure we can run around classifying that as a Class 5 hurricane, you know?). But real life trauma? Of course that started with Artie’s death October 19, 2002. Five months after which (while seeing a psychiatrist and on a lot of antidepressants) I married the next guy who came along and then divorced him even more quickly (and my Norwegian Grandma Inez died late that spring, 2003) then I had my day of heart failure on February 15, 2004, and well, I haven’t exactly been the picture of health since all that. Hmm, could all that have compiled to put me at a 62% higher probability of having breast cancer?

Well, sure, why not. It probably also puts me at ridiculously higher risk for myriad other chronic illnesses I’ve never even heard of, but if it’s not studied in a blind trial and chronicled in a fancy medical journal it doesn’t exist, so, eh, why worry about it.

Now, there are so many things that go into suffering and facing severe adversity that it’s hard to put any credence behind a scientific hypothesis that there is a clear and direct correlation between adverse life events and breast cancer. They didn’t really test for all known breast cancer factors such as family history (well, BRCA 1 and 2 genes anyway) or body weight which are correlated with increased breast cancer risk. So, let’s not get all upset about the findings of this one little study. Besides, in my case anyway, any risk factor increase is a moot point. But if they go further with this research, it will be interesting to see if they start breast cancer screenings earlier in young women with these additional risk factors. Not that I would have been happy about starting mammograms before 30, but I wouldn’t have declined them after being told I was at higher risk for x, y and z.

What we should be upset about at this point is that an entire article about the potential relationship of severe life adversity and breast cancer starts with the word “Happiness!”