Control stress, control cancer?

If you have a problem with stress… and keep putting off learning how to deal with it in a healthy way… you may be making it easier for cancer to spread throughout your body.

Researchers have found that when mice are exposed to chronic, ongoing stress, their lymphatic systems undergo physical changes that make it quicker and easier for cancer to spread throughout their bodies.

And if you have cancer, stress is an understatement. Doctors have a drug that seems to stop this activity and are testing it now on breast cancer patients. But seeing how stress physically helps tumors progress should be a big wake-up call about how strongly stress may impact other diseases or areas of your health.

Scientists already knew that stress hormones could increase blood vessel formation, giving cancerous cells more potential escape routes, but until now it wasn’t clear whether they also influenced the lymphatic system.

To test that theory, mice were restrained to create stress. The researchers found that the stressed-out mice had a higher rate of cancer spreading than their relaxed peers, and were able to show that this was because the stress hormone adrenaline was activating the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) to amp up the rate of lymph formation.

Not only that, the stress hormone actually physically changed the lymph vessels draining out of tumours, allowing cancerous cells to escape to other parts of the body faster.

“So not only do you get new freeways out of the tumor but the speed limit is increased and so the tumor cells can flow out of the tumor much more rapidly,” said Erica Sloan from Monash University in Australia.

The drug that holds promise at slowing spread of cancer from stress is a beta blocker known as propranolol. “When tracked over about seven years, it turned out that those that had been taking beta-blockers also showed far less evidence of tumor cells moving into the lymph nodes and then disseminating to other organs like the lung, so it provides clinical support for what we see in the mice,” Sloan told ABC.

There are concerns that some beta-blockers can cause and worsen heart problems, even congestive heart failure. ¹ A decision to use this medication would need to be carefully considered by patient and doctor.

Healthy ways to handle stress

Because we are learning more about the physical affects of stress on disease, health and our bodies through research, it may be time to change how we perceive stress.

For many people it’s a minor annoyance. For others, like those suffering with cancer, it’s a huge burden. And learning how to handle stress in a healthier way is best done when it doesn’t have such a stronghold on you.

Breathing exercises have been used for centuries by Indian yogis to calm the mind, relax the body and restore health. Adopting this daily practice that just takes minutes a day could have positive health benefits that extend from peace of mind to possibly disease preventing. To learn more about using this breathing technique to improve your health, click here for a demonstration video.

[1] http://www.uptodate.com/contents/major-side-effects-of-beta-blockers