Did Stress Cause My Breast Cancer?

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]Another thing that patients often complain about is their level of stress.

[00:00:04]And I think it's fair to say that most patients have some level of stress, whether it's related to their job, their family situation, relationships, whatever. Could this have been the etiology for developing a cancer and specifically breast cancer? We don't know. Again, it seems like a repetitive theme. We don't know that stress caused the breast cancer. However, we can say with confidence, stress isn't a good thing. If you can minimize it, eliminate it, mitigate it, those are good things.

[00:00:32]They help you cope better, certainly if you develop breast cancer, having less stress as you go through the process of treatment and recovery is a good thing.

[00:00:40]And stress [music] also causes inflammation and, you know, at a cellular level, it could be theorized that that causes an increased [music] risk of developing a cancer. But we don't know that in an individual patient that stress accounts for the reason a given patient developed breast cancer.