Death increases immediately after a cancer diagnosis
Death increases immediately after a cancer diagnosis.
Image by christine.gleason via Flickr
Cancer can kill long before malignant tumors take their toll, new research shows. A study involving more than 6 million Swedes reveals that the risk of suicide and cardiovascular death increases immediately after a cancer diagnosis.
Within the first week of being told they had cancer, patients were 12.6 times more likely to commit suicide than people of similar backgrounds who were cancer-free. The newly diagnosed patients were also 5.6 times more likely to die from a heart attack or other cardiovascular complication in those first seven days, according to a study published in Thursday's edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.
“One has to assume that it's the psychological impact of that news,” said Dr. Ilan Wittstein, a cardiologist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, who was not involved in the study.
“This is not data that suggests cancer, and the physical stress of the cancer, is what's causing people to die,” he said. “These are people getting the news, and within a very short period dying from heart disease — long before treatment ever begins.”
The researchers examined the records of 6,073,240 people born in Sweden and linked them to the national Cancer, Causes of Death, and Migration registers. Since each person has a unique identification number, researchers could pick out those who received cancer diagnoses and look up the cause of death….More at Cancer diagnosis raises risk of heart attack and suicide, study says
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