The Danish Cancer Society (DCS) appear to have quashed the long-lived myth that stress leads to cancer.

The conclusion was reached by collecting the records of 1,300 Danish resistance fighters who survived imprisonment in German concentration camps during World War II.

By comparing these records with those of every cancer-related death since 1943, the researchers were unable to find any scientific evidence that suggested a correlation between cancer and stress.

It had proved difficult in the past to quantify stress as it affects people in various ways. Furthermore, to make a study credible it was crucial to understand the stress levels of patients prior to a cancer diagnosis.

Previous research would tend to look at stressful life-events such as a divorce or the loss of a job.

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Great psychological duress
DCS researchers circumvented this problem by choosing Danish resistance fighters as their subjects due to the psychological duress the stay in a concentration camp would have caused.

The accurate records also enabled the researchers to compare the prevalence and mortality rates of cancer in resistance fighters with the overall population of Denmark:

"The good news is that we have found no clear correlation between stress and various cancers," said Maja Halgren Olsen, a Phd student working for the Centre for Cancer Research at the DCS

"Not even when it comes to cancers linked to the immune and hormonal systems – such as prostate cancer and leukemia – which were suspected of having a connection to stress."

The overall research did find cancer to be more prevalent in resistance fighters compared to the rest of the Danish population, but this has been attributed to smoking and drinking habits.