Best way to beat Big C: Get married!

A new report drawn up by an American team of researchers indicates that being married may well have beneficial survival effects for cancer sufferers. Married patients are less likely to die in the first three years and also less likely to have secondaries. The message: do not underestimate the psychological factor.

Dr. Paul Nguyen from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, led the a study which took into account information from some 735,000 people in the United States of America diagnosed with cancer between the years 2004 and 2008. The types of cancer involved were many, to be specific, ten: lung cancer, colorectal, breast, pancreatic cancer, prostate, liver and bile duct, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, head and neck cancer, ovarian cancer and esophageal cancer.

The results, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, are astonishing: cancer patients who are married are up to 20 per cent more likely to survive the three-year period after the disease was diagnosed and furthermore, they are 17 per cent less likely to suffer from secondaries, metastatic cancer which spreads beyond the primary point of diagnosis. The final conclusion was that people who are married are between twelve and thirty-three per cent less probable to die from cancer than those who are single.

The first conclusion was the social importance of being permanently linked with someone - pains, first symptoms would be more likely to be shared at a date earlier than those people who live alone. Secondly, there would be more probability for someone to exist on a daily basis to administer treatments and follow through healthcare procedures.

However, there is something more, potentially on a more spiritual or psychological level. Firstly, the benefit of being married weighed more in favour of men than for women. But there was another finding which baffled the researchers and which calls for further studies.

The survival rate linked with prostate, breast, colorectal, esophageal and head/neck cancers tended to weigh more on the fact of being married than chemo-therapy regimes. This may also be due to the fact that the cancer is caught earlier...or is there an undisclosed or unstudied psychological vector in cancer therapy?

Biosynthesis seems to point towards the fact that there is...

Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey

Pravda.Ru