Can cancer be triggered by a stressful event?!
Question:
Can cancer be triggered by a stressful event?
My uncle's house was burglarized and he was thrown to the ground and pointed at with a gun by the thieves. One month later, he started having health problems and he was diagnosed with cancer.
Is there any evidence that cancer can be triggered by a stressful event like this one?
Answers:
No; the cancer couldn't have been caused by the stress. Cancer is a disease characterized by a population of cells that grow and divide without respect to normal limits, invade and destroy adjacent tissues, and may spread to distant anatomic sites through a process called metastasis. These life-threatening, malignant properties of cancers differentiate them from benign tumors, which are self-limited in their growth and do not invade or metastasize. Cancer may affect people at all ages, but risk for the more common varieties tends to increase with age. It is one of the principal causes of death in developed countries.
Nearly all cancers are caused by abnormalities in the genetic material of the transformed cells. These abnormalities may be due to the effects of carcinogens, such as tobacco smoke, radiation, chemicals, or infectious agents. Other cancer-promoting genetic abnormalities may be randomly acquired through errors in DNA replication, or are inherited, and thus present in all cells from birth. Complex interactions between carcinogens and the host genome may explain why only some patients get cancer after exposure to a known carcinogen. New aspects of the genetics of cancer pathogenesis, such as DNA methylation, and microRNAs are increasingly being recognized as important.