Feeling stressed out linked to cervical cancer

Feeling stressed could play a role in the development of cervical cancer, a new report suggests.

But experts say the findings are still preliminary and it's too soon to rush out and enroll in a stress-management course in hopes of combating the disease.

The human papillomavirus (HPV) has long been known as the primary cause of cervical cancer, but the virus alone doesn't seem to be enough to induce the disease. Most sexually active women will contract HPV at some point in their lives, but 90 percent will clear the virus from their body before it causes any damage, suggesting other factors are at play in the unfortunate minority who eventually develop cervical cancer.

The new study, published Friday in the journal Annals of Behavioral Medicine, found that feeling stressed out may be one such factor by impairing the body's ability to fight off the virus.

“Women who reported higher levels of perceived stress — regardless of what was actually happening in their life — showed an impaired immune response to HPV,” said Carolyn Fang, a psychologist at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia and lead author of the study.

Too early for alarm
However, it's too early to sound the alarm, Fang added. More research is needed to confirm the finding and show that reducing stress improves the body's ability to fight off HPV.

“I don't want women to think that just because they're feeling stressed they will get cervical cancer,” Fang said.

Previous research has indicated that women with higher levels of stress were more likely to develop cervical cancer, so Fang's team decided to look at whether stress somehow impaired the body's immune response to HPV.

The study involved 74 women who had abnormal Pap smears that revealed precancerous cells and another 28 women who had normal Pap results. (Half of the women with abnormal Pap results were infected with HPV strains known to cause cancer, including the culprit known as HPV-16, compared with about 18 percent of the women with normal Pap tests.)