Cancer patients 20 times more likely to commit suicide in year after diagnosis: study
Cancer patients are around 20 times more likely to commit suicide in the year after diagnosis than people without cancer, according to a study by a research group at the National Cancer Center.
After a year, the difference in suicide rates largely disappears. The research group is calling for attention to cancer patients’ psychological stress and environmental changes in the period soon after diagnosis.
The study, the first large-scale report in Japan on the connection between disease and suicide, followed around 100,000 people in nine prefectures for around 20 years until the end of 2010. The subjects of the study were aged from 40 to 69 at the time it began. Over the course of the observation period, 561 of the people committed suicide, 34 of them having been diagnosed with cancer. The rate of suicide among subjects in the first year after cancer diagnosis was 23.9 times what it was for those without cancer. After a year had passed, the difference was only 1.1 times.
Cancer patients were also 18.8 times more likely to die in the first year after diagnosis from “death by external causes,” which is thought to have included a fair number of suicides, than people without cancer. After a year the difference dropped to 1.2 times.
Lower numbers came from a study in Sweden on around six million people, which found that people became 13 times more likely than normal to commit suicide in the first week after cancer diagnosis and were around three times more likely to do so for the first year.
Also, research results from Europe and the United States suggest suicide rates are lower for cancer patients with relatively early stages of the disease, but almost no such difference amongst those who committed suicide was found in the Japanese study.
Cancer affects one in two Japanese and accounts for around 30 percent of the country’s deaths. However, thanks to medical advancements, statistics taken from 2003 to 2005 found over half of patients were still alive five years after their diagnosis. When the patients were diagnosed in the early stages of their disease, they were still alive five years later in around 90 percent of cases.
As such research shows that cancer will no longer necessarily lead to a quick death, the government in its 2012 basic cancer countermeasure promotion plan called for “the building of a society where people can live in peace even after getting cancer” as an overall goal, in addition to reducing the cancer death rate.
Researcher Takashi Yamauchi of the National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry, who analyzed the study’s data, said, “It can be speculated that in addition to the shock of being diagnosed with cancer, which has a strong association with death, changes to lifestyle caused by cancer treatment and, depending on the person, unemployment or financial difficulties all overlap early on and raise the likelihood of suicide. There were differences in the methods used in the Japanese study and in foreign studies, but the fact that suicide rates were high in both early and advanced cancer (in the Japanese study as opposed to the foreign studies) shows that we need to expand support and carefully explain that more people can recover from cancer these days.”
Professor of psycho-oncology Hideki Onishi of Saitama Medical University said, “Compared to the Swedish study results, the suicide rate was quite high. Medical professionals need to better notice cancer patients’ psychological stress and urge them to be seen by a psychiatrist when necessary.”
Source: Mainichi
