cancer

Prostate Cancer Diagnosis Increases Sucide Risk

Posted Feb 11th 2010 8:00AM by Amber Greviskes
Filed under: Research
Prostate cancer can increase a man's odds for either suicide of fatal heart attack, according to a research group at Harvard Medical School.

A cancer diagnosis is stressful, and that stress can cause a number of changes in cardiovascular risk factors. Those, coupled with underlying health conditions, may be more likely to drive someone to suicide.

Although doctors focused on those recently diagnosed with prostate cancer, they believe that the results will be similar for patients with other types of cancer. The researchers plan to do a similar study of breast and colon cancer patients.

The researchers started with prostate cancer because they wanted to test whether the widespread use of screening using the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test has made a difference.

Men diagnosed with prostate cancer had a 40 percent higher risk of suicide in the year after the diagnosis than those in the general population between 1979 and 2004.

The risk of heart attack and heart disease in men diagnosed with prostate cancer was only 9 percent higher in the first year after diagnosis. However, the risk of hear attack and heart disease more than doubled during the first month after diagnosis.