Emotional Link

As the search for causes of the many diseases called cancer goes on, most money and effort have been spent on exploring biological characteristics. At the same time, however, a small but growing group of medical researchers is seeking a possible connection between cancer and psychology. Recently, at a three-day conference of the New York Academy of Sciences in Manhattan, medical researchers reported on a number of studies suggesting that a link between emotions and cancer may indeed exist.

Apparently most prone to cancer, said Conference Chairman Claus B. Bahnson, professor of psychiatry at Philadelphia's Jefferson Medical College, are persons who deny and repress their emotions after experiencing personal loss or tragedy. Rather than expressing grief normally through mourning, such people, he said, channel their emotional response internally through the nervous system. This in turn upsets the body's hormonal balance. It may also affect immunological processes. Both of these mechanisms may play a significant role in controlling and combatting the rogue cell growth of cancer.

Parental Problem. But why, Bahnson wondered, would tragedy and loss render only some people cancer-prone when almost every human being experiences them during a lifetime?

Checking the psychological back grounds of some 80 cancer patients, Bahnson found that they all had a "poor, ungratifying, mechanical relationship to their parents." Since the parents were unable or unwilling to respond emotionally, he said, their chil dren developed a tendency to repress rather than express their own emotions.

Later in life this self-imposed lack of emotional outlets made them more vulnerable to tragedy and, therefore, more cancer-prone than the average person.

Other studies cited during the conference support the theory. Research by Dr. William A. Greene at the University of Rochester has shown that a high percentage of cancer patients suffered feelings of extreme helplessness and hopelessness rather than cathartic grief prior to the onset of their illness.

A comparative study of 200 lung-cancer patients and 200 victims of other chest diseases, made by the late Dr.David M. Kissen of Glasgow's Southern General Hospital, revealed that the cancer patients were less able to release their emotions. What's more, researchers reported last week, emotional inhibition parallels high per-capita cancer incidence among many peoples.

Sioux Indians, by contrast, are known to give vent to their emotions with re ative ease. Among them, cancer is virtually nonexistent.

The psychologists and psychiatrists took pains to point out that they are not suggesting repression of emotions as a direct cause of cancer, but rather as a condition that may contribute to the development of the disease. If the theory proves correct, they suggest, some cancers could one day be thwarted by preventive psychotherapy.

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