Emotions, Sex & Cancer

Medical men are turning up more and more evidence that there is a connection between the emotions and cancer. Research teams (in Chicago, in Manhattan and at U.C.L.A.) studied cancer patients to find out what sort of psychological makeup they had before they developed the disease. They soon found that the average victim of breast or prostate cancer was unable to express such basic drives as anger, aggressiveness, or sexual impulses, suffered from an inner turmoil "covered over by a fac,ade of pleasantness."

In Psychosomatic Medicine, California's Dr. Eugene M. Blumberg and his colleagues report on patients with a wide variety of cancers: "We . . . were impressed by the polite, apologetic, almost painful acquiescence of the patients with rapidly progressing disease, as contrasted with the more expressive and sometimes bizarre personalities of those who responded brilliantly to therapy with long remissions and long survival."

Another team, Drs. James H. Stephenson and William J. Grace of New York Hospital, compared 100 women with cancer of the cervix and 100 with cancer not involving the reproductive system. They found that sexual adjustment among the cervix cancer victims had been poor long before they developed the disease: they had had less intercourse than the others and rarely enjoyed orgasm. In many cases there was actual aversion for the sexual act, and their marriages had been troubled, as indicated by a much higher rate of divorce, desertion or separation. Their cancer, the doctors suggest, might have been caused by physiological changes which occur in the cervix during emotional stress (e.g., change in blood flow and secretions, varying stimulation of the nerves).

Concluded the U.C.L.A. researchers: "Our impression is that the very development of cancer in man might conceivably result from the physiological effects of inner stress which has remained unresolved by either outward action or successful adaptation."

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