Psychosocial Treatment of Cancer - a Lancet report

 

Respected All,

 

A paper published in The Lancet in 1989 reported a very interesting finding. (Spiegel, D. et al. (1989). Effect of Psychosocial Treatment on Survival of Patients with Metastatic Breast Cancer. Lancet,2, 888-891). This study was a 10 year follow-up to a previous study in order to determine the effect of psychosocial intervention on the time of survival of 86 patients with metastatic breast cancer. The 1 year intervention consisted of a weekly supportive group therapy with self hypnosis for pain. Patients imagined their wbc's killing their cancer cells and dead cancer cells being flushed out of the body. Both the treatmnent and control groups had routine oncological care. At 10 year follow-up, survival time for the treatment group was significantly longer compared with controls. In addition, the interval from fist metastasis to death was significantly longer for the group randomized to treatment. Th\1S the intervention group lived on average twice as long as did controls.

 

Interesting, isn't it. I wonder what is going on at molecular levels in this case? Are there imagination based changes in gene expression?

 

Kind Regards,

Tarun Gupta
--
MSc Human Genomics
National Centre for Human Genome Studies and Research
Panjab University
Chandigarh-India

Appeal: Let's not make information inaccessible to masses; Let's publish in Open Access Journals!

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