P01-268 - The Role of Psychostress in Breast Cancer Carcinogenesis

Abstract

Stress as a risk factor is often taken into consideration in various research studies nowadays. There seems to be an emotional background in developing different diseases.

The aim of the study was to quantify psychostress through a case-control approach.

Methodology

Following the matching in accordance with age, place of living, profession and marital status, 286 cases and 529 controls were interviewed looking for these parametres: death of the family member, an accident with severe consequences, the loss of work, a serious illness of a family member, divorce. Multifactorial logistic regression analysis was used for relative risk (RR), interval of cofidence (IC), attributive risk (AR), an estimation parametre vector, standard error, standard regressional coefficient, HI square test.

Results

The study shows that the biggest emotional stress is death of child, death of mother, loss of work, disability, all of which were generally experienced two years prior to clinical diagnosis of the disease. RR for the cases is l.9 with the IC l.4 - 2.6 and AR 22%. RR for women in urban areas is higher than for those in rural areas and reads 2.2 with IC l.5- 3.l. It is interesting to point out that RR is the highest among the women aged 30 - 39 and reads 4.4, whereas for women aged 65 and beyond it is l.6.

Conclusion

According to the results in multifactorial etyology of the carcinogenesis we come to the conclusion that psychostress acted as a promoter two years before the illness was clinically diagnosed.