Cancer Affects Everyone

Yet more evidence of a link between the body and mind comes in a new study of elderly people with severe depression.

Those who were assigned a ‘depression coach’ were far less likely to die during the five years of the study. And, inexplicably, deaths from cancer were 60 per cent lower than the group who were given standard care for depression.

The study looked at the impact of a ‘depression coach’, or depression care manager, on elderly people with severe depression who were registered with one of 20 practices in the USA that participated in the trial.

Overall, the death rate over the five years of the trial fell by 45 per cent among those who had a personal manager, but the most impressive improvement was in the reduction of deaths from cancer, which fell from 20.6 deaths per 1000 person years to just 8.9 deaths.

Researchers are baffled by the sudden improvement. Perhaps it’s simply that the elderly had someone to talk to, and the manager gave them a reason to live.

Just a thought.

(Source: Annals of Internal Medicine, 2007; 146: 689-98).

We all know that exercise is good for us, and a gentle version of it is especially beneficial for anyone with a heart condition. But now researchers have discovered that it can also help people with cancer.

A research team put a small group of women with early-stage breast cancer through a 12-week exercise programme, which included fast walking. All the women reported greater mobility in their shoulders, and the quality of their life had improved. These improvements carried on for six months after completing the exercise programme.

But earlier studies suggest an even more exciting possibility. In a review of 48 studies, researchers found that postmenopausal women who exercised reduced their risk of breast cancer by 80 per cent, while it had a 20 per cent protective effect among women who had not reached menopause.

(Source: British Medical Journal, 2007; 334: 484-5; Epidemiology, 2007; 18: 137-157).

Women who supplement with vitamin D – or who do a little sunbathing once or twice a week – reduce their chances of developing breast cancer.

Researchers found that the vitamin, coupled with calcium, helps protect women, and especially from more aggressive breast tumours.

This was the first major human study into the protective effects of vitamin D. It was based on the findings from the Women’s Health Study, and involved 10,578 pre-menopausal, and 20,909 post-menopausal, women, whose health was monitored for 10 years.

The researchers found that the supplements’ main protective effect was among the pre-menopausal women.

(Source: Archives of Internal Medicine, 2007; 167: 1050-9).

Mobile phones may cause a cancer explosion in the years ahead, just as smoking was finally linked to lung cancer, experts have admitted this week.

At the moment nobody is sure of the impact of mobile phones on our health because people haven’t been using them long enough – but early signs are worrying.

A UK health research group has discovered an increase of brain and acoustic neuroma (ear) cancers, and the figures are almost “statistically significant”, which means the figures are nearly high enough to suggest a definite link.

The group, the UK Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research Programme (MTHRP), said it was vital to carry out more research, otherwise people were in danger of falling into the same trap when cigarettes were not initially linked to lung cancer.

Programme chairman Prof Lawrie Challis comments: “We can’t rule out the possibility at this stage that cancer could appear in a few years’ time. With smoking there was no link of any lung cancer until after 10 years.”

Cancers usually do not appear until 10 to 15 years after exposure.

Aside from the longterm concerns, Prof Challis said that mobile phones do not appear to have an immediate impact on health.

(Source: MTHRP website).