Links between private habits, psychological stress and brain cancer: a case–control pilot study in France

Abstract

Numerous studies have increasingly suggested that medical history and lifestyle factors could be involved in the increase of cancer risk in adults. The issue whether psychological factors can influence the development of cancer has been discussed for many years. In the field of brain cancer, psychological stress has not so far been investigated. We conducted a French case-control pilot study with 122 adult incident cases and 122 controls free of any cancer diagnosis, matched for age and gender, to investigate links between malignant primitive brain tumours (MPBT) and medical history, private habits and psychological stress. Data were collected through self-administered questionnaires, and person-to-person interviews. To complete the psychological stress assessment, 100-mm visual analog scales were used. After adjustment for confounders, we found no significant effect of head trauma, aspartame, tobacco or alcohol consumption, place (rural or urban) of residence, sociodemographic data, and experience of psychological stress at work/home. Our results showed a significant association between MPBT risk and major life events over the past 5 years before diagnosis (OR = 1.90, 95% CI 1.13-3.20), family histories of cancer (OR = 1.90, 95% CI 1.12-3.22), fresh vegetable and fruit intake (OR = 0.29, 95% CI 0.09-0.95), and skipped meals several times per week (OR = 0.35, 95% CI 0.16-0.77). The present study suggests the role of genetic factors in glioma risk, and also suggests that an acute and sudden psychological stress might influence MPBT appearance. Additional large clinical studies are needed to confirm these findings.

Dietary and Alcohol Intake and Central Nervous System Tumors in Adults: Results of the CERENAT Multicenter Case-Control Study

“…Our findings are consistent with previous results showing that aspartame is not associated with an increased risk of brain tumor in a population with moderate dietary intake [27][28][29] .…”

“…Two experimental studies in mice revealed their potential role in brain tumors [26] , although these results were not confirmed by further toxicological experiments or by epidemiological studies [27][28][29] .…”

Alcohol Consumption and Risk of Glioma: A Meta-Analysis of 19 Observational Studies

“…Seven additional studies were identified from the reference lists of relevant studies. Therefore, 19 studies (fifteen case-control and four cohort studies) included data suitable for our meta-analysis [15,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44]. Studies were published from 1970 to 2011.…”

Risk factors for gliomas. An extensive review

“…A study noted a higher incidence of gliomas in professionals of the following domains: IT, farm workers, financial, medicine, management, while it found a decreased incidence in childcare workers (127). A possible link between gliomas and physiological stress was also investigated, and found that major life events in a 5 years period prior to diagnostic, constituted a risk factor (128). Studies trying to find a connection between sociodemographic variables and gliomas found mixed or inconclusive results (129).…”