Prolonging life: Attitude and cancer

In tomorrow morning’s column (October 30), I wrote about a study that made the front page of the Montreal Gazette last week. It reported on a study by James Coyne that showed that cancer survival was not affected by attitude. I had the topic in the back of my mind for a while since this particular study only confirmed what research was already pretty clear on.

The initial buzz about how attitude can prolong life was a combination of research bias and wishful thinking. Nevertheless, I was always of the opinion that days lived should be measured by the number of quality days. By this measure, attitude does prolong life by giving us a lot more of them, whether we have cancer or not.

This study was made all the more poignant by the fact that my cousin is dying of advanced esophageal cancer.

I wrote something similar last year in a column called “Getting your wish.” You can find it in the link to the Métro columns.

How many days will you live?
Camillo Zacchia, Ph.D.
Psychologist – Douglas Institute

Do people with cancer live longer if they have a positive attitude? A large and well-designed study was just published in the journal Cancer that examined this question and came up with the conclusion that a state of emotional well-being had no effect on survival. The results may have surprised many people since the idea that a positive attitude is beneficial to beating cancer, or at least holding it off, is a popular one. On the other hand, can we really say that attitude has no effect on survival?

Calendar days
The idea that a positive attitude helps cancer sufferers live longer has been around a long time. We certainly all want to believe it, and early studies of the question were able to demonstrate a dramatic effect. One study even found that women with breast cancer lived an average of eighteen months longer by simply being part of a support group. Later studies were not able to reproduce the findings, and this new study simply confirms what was becoming pretty clear; cancer takes away everyone at the same rate regardless of whether they keep a sunny outlook or wallow in despair.
What this means is that if we simply count days on a calendar, attitude does not change the final number. I just don’t think that is what we should be measuring.

Life days
How do we define a day of life? Technically, it is obvious. If we haven’t died before the stroke of midnight, we can put a checkmark on our calendar. But what kind of life is it? If I spend the day doing something I enjoy, or connecting with friends and loved ones, or simply appreciating the little things that make us human, like a piece of music, a laugh, or the smell of freshly fallen leaves, then I have done far more than simply existed.

A lesson for the rest of us
Everyone has a finite number of days left on the earth. What that number is remains unknown for most of us. While it may not be particularly pleasant to contemplate this fact, I think it is important to learn a lesson from this study. Attitude alone does not prolong the number of days lived with cancer if we measure with a calendar. If we measure the quality of those days, however, attitude makes all the difference.

I think the same can be said for the rest of us as well.


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Posted in Happiness, Life.

Posted on 29 Oct 2007

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