Women with PTSD more likely to develop ovarian cancer, suggests study

Women who exhibit many classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may be much more likely to develop ovarian cancer than their counterparts who don’t, a new study suggests.

For the study, researchers asked women to identify the most stressful event of their lives and report whether they experienced seven different symptoms of PTSD. Women who suffered from six or seven PTSD symptoms were more than twice as likely to develop ovarian cancer as women who didn’t report any of these symptoms, the study found.

“We hypothesise that stress hormones directly affect cancer cells that may be in the body, causing them to grow faster and become more invasive,” said Andrea Roberts, lead author of the study and a research scientist at the Harvard T H Chan School of Public Health in Boston.

“It is also possible that chronic stress interferes with the body’s ability to kill cancer cells,” Roberts said by email. Read Complete Article