Stress may contribute to cervical cancer

Philadelphia PA

Researchers know that human papilloma virus, or HPV, is responsible for the vast majority of cervical cancers. But usually, when a woman is infected with HPV, the infection resolves by itself, without any medical treatment. And many more people are exposed to HPV than get cancer. Rose Hoban reports on efforts to understand what causes some women to get cancer, and others not.

How women deal with stress may affect their risk of cervical cancer. Scientists have wondered what increases a woman's risk for cervical cancer once she has been exposed to HPV. And they also wonder why some people get cancer and others don't.

Studies have suggested that psychological stress is associated with decreased immune protection. Researcher Carolyn Fang from the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia says she wanted to see if this was true with women exposed to HPV.

Fang and her colleagues recruited women who had changes on their Pap smear, the test used to detect early cell changes indicative of cervical cancer. They had the women fill out questionnaires that asked more than simply medical history.

"We asked … about how they were feeling at that time, how they had been feeling in the past month, what kinds of events have occurred in their lives over the past six months," Fang explains.

The women were asked about two kinds of stress: one was a checklist of stressful events that may have taken place recently in the women's lives, the other was a subjective measure of how stressed they felt. Then researchers took blood samples from each subject. The blood was used in their analysis of immune response to HPV. More >>

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