Depression and Loneliness Equal Higher Breast Cancer Risk?

As you know, there are many, many risk factors that contribute to the likelihood of you getting breast cancer.  Number one is still supposed to be genetics, since there are genetic markers that can make you several times more predisposed to getting this common cancer, although I still believe personally that lifestyle and diet habits also play a large role as well.

And, of course, you know that lifestyle factors such as smoking, drinking alcohol, and your diet regimen also make a difference in your risk profile as well.  That is why it’s important to manage these facets of your life. Well, there is another one that you may want to closely manage now as well, and unfortunately managing it isn’t so easy for some of us, especially those of us  who are naturall prone to it or have livelihoods where it happens to be a natural biproduct of what we do. I’m talking about stress.

Not just stress though, isolation.  In other words, it has been found that isolation in women many times is accompanied by stress and anxiety, which has been shown to be linked to higher risk of breast cancer.  Studies were actually done on mice, who have biological systems much like us humans, and it was found that when they were witheld from socialization and put in an isolated situation, the stress that was caused by the isolation altered the way the genes acted, making it more likely they would succumb to abnormal cell growth (aka cancer) of the breast tissue.

This led researchers to believe that stressful lifestyles definitely can lend a hand to determining whether someone will develop cancerous growth of tissues that are prone to cancer from the beginning.  If one can control their stress better, obviously this is better for your overall health, and also contributes to lessening of heart disease and other stress triggered and aggravated conditions, but it also now can definitely help with the likelihood of developing breast cancer in females.