THE ESSENTIAL
- Prostate cancer is the most common in men with 50,000 new cases in 2015.
- For women, breast cancer is the most common, with 58,000 new cases recorded in 2018.
There are two main forms of stress: one says chronic and the other says “acute”. The first corresponds to a lasting state linked to various known and/or sometimes unsuspected sources of stress. On the other hand, the second is generally due to an event experienced as difficult and sudden, and results in an intense and brutal emotion.
Stress wears out the body: the allostatic load
According to one new study, chronic stress might increase the risk of dying from cancer. Indeed, the authors demonstrated that the bodies of people who are often stressed were more worn out, a phenomenon called charge allostatique. “In response to external stressors your body releases a hormone called cortisol, when the stress is over these levels go back downexplains Justin Xavier Moore, one of the authors. But, if you have chronic and ongoing psychosocial stressors, which never allow you to “come down”, it can wear down your body on a biological level.“
To understand the impact of stress, researchers analyzed health data from more than 41,000 people. There was body mass index, blood pressure, cholesterol, hemoglobin A1C (higher levels indicate risk for diabetes), albumin and creatinine (both measures of kidney function) and C-reactive protein (which shows inflammation). All of this information allowed the researchers to determine the allostatic load. Then, they cross-referenced this data with that of the American Cancer Registry.
2.4 times more likely to die from cancer
Thus, they concluded that people with a high allostatic load were 2.4 times more likely to die of cancer than those with a low allostatic load. A result obtained without taking other variables into account. However, previous work had shown that adults aged 40 and over had an increased risk of allostatic load compared to those under 30. Additionally, regardless of time period, black and Latino adults are at higher risk for allostatic load compared to white people.
“We know that there are differences in allostatic loads depending on age, race and sex, confirme Justin Xavier Moore. If you were born into an environment where your opportunities are very different from those of male and white adults, for example if you are a black woman, your life trajectory involves facing more adversity. So they then redid their calculations taking into account socio-demographic factors, such as gender, race and level of education. Thus, the researchers observed that chronic stress led to a 21% increase in the risk of dying from cancer.
Adding other factors, such as smoking or having had a heart attack, the authors still found a 14% increased risk of dying from cancer due to allostatic load. . The ideal would therefore be to reduce everyone’s stress, to avoid contracting cancer… A very common disease. In 2018, in France, 382,000 new cases were detected according to Public health France.