The team at Harvard and Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston used data from more than 340,000 prostate cancer patients diagnosed between 1979 and 2004, comparing rates of suicide and deaths from heart disease to those in the general population. Analysis of the data found that there was a 90 percent increase in the rate of suicides in patients compared to general population. However, the researchers then felt that the elevated suicide risk was most strongly tied to the period before screening for prostate cancer using the prostate-specific antigen or (PSA) blood test became standard practice in 1993. Post this study, the researchers believed that the suicide rate had declined considerably, while the rate of heart related deaths post prostate cancer diagnosis remained elevated.
However, a recent collaboration including researchers from Harvard University and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden looked at data for more than 4 million men in Sweden above the age of 30 and found that the diagnosis of prostate cancer — something that occurred in over 160,000 of those men — increased the relative risks for fatal heart problems eleven times and suicide by eight times in the week after diagnosis.
Prostate cancer is the second most common cancer worldwide after lung cancer, killing 254,000 men a year globally. Doctors have routinely recommended PSA screening in men over 50 based on the assumption that early diagnosis and treatment is better than standing by and doing nothing.
“Our study brings one more piece of the puzzle, which is the stress associated with the diagnosis itself,” said Lorelei Mucci of Brigham & Women’s and the Harvard School of Public Health, who worked on the study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. She said the findings suggest more men need counselling and support after a prostate cancer diagnosis. “That is where we hope our finding can add to clinical practice,” she said.
The Harvard researchers are currently trying out a program that seeks to ease the effects of a cancer diagnosis on the cardiovascular system by enrolling men in a walking program. “We have done a pilot project and have applied for funding for a larger program,” Mucci said.
Written by Snigdha Taduri for Biomed-ME