Earlier studies have shown that women living with breast cancer are at a risk of depression but new studies have shown that their partners are at a similar risk. The study looked at more than a million men enrolled in a nationwide Danish health registry followed for 13 years.
Men whose partners were diagnosed with breast cancer during this period were almost 50% more likely to be hospitalized for depression, bipolar disorder or other mood disorders compared to men whose partners did not have breast cancer. The hospitalization rate was almost fourfold higher for men whose partners died of the disease when compared to men whose partners survived breast cancer.
According to study researcher Christoffer Johansen, of Denmark’s Institute of Cancer Epidemiology these men are more prone to mental ill health because their emotional needs are often overlooked. Sleep disturbances (oversleeping or not sleeping at all), lack of appetite and feelings of despair, helplessness and hopelessness are signs that men might be suffering from depression and should get medical attention
The study appears today online in the journal Cancer, published by the American Cancer Society. This study is the first to use data from a nationwide registry of depression and other mood-disorder-related hospitalizations to objectively assess the risk of severe depression and mood disorders among partners of breast cancer patients, also identified through a national health registry.
Between 1994 and 2006, roughly 20,500 women with partners received a diagnosis of breast cancer. During the same period, 180 of the partners were hospitalized for depression or other serious mood disorders. The comparison is with 12,000 hospitalizations among 1.1 million men with wives or girlfriends who were not diagnosed with breast cancer.
Authors recommend screening partners of cancer patients for depression. This is seconded by University of Washington professor of family and child nursing Frances Marcus Lewis. She has studied the emotional impact of breast cancer on the spouses of women being treated for the disease in the past but her research was more on depressed mood and not major depression. She had found that there was an increase in depressed mood even among men whose wives had a low risk of dying from their disease. At present she is leading a larger trial, funded by the National Cancer Institute, designed to identify interventions that can reduce depression among spouses of breast cancer patients. She pointed out that emotional impact of this cancer was often overlooked, “Diseases like late-stage Alzheimer’s get a different type of attention, because the emotional impact on spouses is widely recognized.” “I really do believe sharing feelings and thoughts -- even fears and other negative emotions -- can have a big impact on emotional and physical healing,” she concluded.
According to Holly Prigerson, Director of the Center for Psycho-oncology and Palliative Care Research at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston men are different from women in their ability to cope with the emotional stress of caring for a partner with cancer. She said, “Men have a lot more difficulty negotiating being a caregiver than their wives do. If the shoe were on the other foot the wives would feel more able to be emotionally available…It's taking sex differences in expression of emotion to a different level.” Help may be warranted even if not felt immediately by the men she said. Dr. Tom Smith, an oncologist and palliative care expert at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA added that depression and anxiety can be successfully treated when identified.
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