Psychological Features of Breast Cancer in Mexican Women I: Personality Traits and Stress Symptoms

Abstract

Breast cancer (BC) is one of the leading causes of death among women worldwide. Identification of susceptible women might help us reduce BC-related deaths. Traditionally women's susceptibility to BC has been estimated based on family, reproductive and nutritional histories and/or genotyping. Unfortunately, predictions made based on all these factors remain imprecise. Research conducted over the past decades supports the premise that patients displaying some personality traits are prone to develop cancer. Nevertheless, conflicting results have been published. We then conducted a study aimed at evaluating relationships between specific personality traits and different types of breast pathology. This approach aimed at evaluating whether personality profiling, in conjunction with other parameters might help us, in the near future, to identify more accurately Mexican women susceptible to develop BC. As a first step towards this goal, we asked whether healthy women and patients having signs of benign breast pathology or cancer shared or not specific personality traits. We used the Courtauld Emotional Control Total Score, the Weinberger Adjustment Inventory and the Symptoms of Stress Inventory to identify personality traits. Our results indicated that women diagnosed with benign or malign breast pathology share low restraint, low global stress symptoms, low physical stress symptoms, low restraint-defensiveness composite and high distress before diagnosis. This outcome was independent of the educational level, as well as of family, reproductive and nutritional histories, supporting that the weight of the psychological traits is greater than that of the latter variables, at least in our sample.

Emotions, stress symptoms and breast cancer in Mexican women: The physiological markers of anxiety restraint.

“…Regarding anxiety, previous studies reported anxiety suppression (Romo-González, Martínez, et al, 2018). Here, we evaluated anxiety in two dimensions: trait and state, showing that TA was significantly distinctive in the BBP and BC groups (Table 1).…”

“…Social network analysis was constructed from the binary data obtained from the significant associations indicated by Fisher's exact tests under an R environment (R Core Team, 2018). The procedure is described below: First, a binary database of the psychological variables was prepared, considering the presence or absence of the psychological trait according to the scores obtained with the different scales applied (Diaz-Guerrero and Spielberg, 1975;Durá et al, 2010;Moreno-Jiménez et al, 2006;Romo-González et al, 2018). A binary This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.…”

“…Previous studies have reported the presence of anxiety and anxiety suppression in both BC patients and patients diagnosed with BBP. (Montes-Nogueira et al, 2018; Romo-González, Martínez, et al, 2018). In this article, we corroborated the presence and kind of anxiety, understood as the anticipated and unpleasant sensation of tension, worry, or nervousness, which results in the activation of the autonomous nervous system, accompanied by visible behavioral manifestations in the face of diffuse events.…”

“…This coping style leads to a persistent activation of the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis and the sympathetic nervous system, leading to chronic stress that in turn subdues immune system surveillance (Montes-Nogueira et al, 2017). In fact, an investigation conducted in Mexican women showed that BC patients commonly suppress anxiety and represses their emotions, in comparison to healthy (H) women or women who have benign breast pathology (BBP; Montes-Nogueira et al, 2018; Romo-González, Martínez, et al, 2018). These traits, in fact, constitute the basic nodes of a psychological network in which interconnectedness progressively decreases (Montes-Nogueira et al, 2018).…”

Psychological suppressive profile and autoantibodies variability in women living with breast cancer: A prospective cross-sectional study

“…In this regard, we have identified in a sample of Mexican women, personality traits related to emotional suppression and low-stress symptoms reporting that can be useful in identifying susceptibility to BC. In particular, in BC cases, suppression of anxiety was the most important feature ( Romo-González et al., 2018 ). Likewise, the analysis of networks of these characteristics showed that the groups with pathology (BC and benign breast pathology (BBP)) presented their own spatial rearrangement.…”