Study: Holocaust survivors have higher risk of cancer
Researchers suggest that stress or extreme deprivation may play a role in triggering cancer.
By Reuters Tags: Holocaust Israel news cancerIsraeli Jews who survived World War Two in Europe have a significantly higher risk for cancer than other Jews, possibly as a result of hardships endured in the Holocaust, researchers said on Monday.
They said their study, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, suggests that stress or other factors such as extreme deprivation may play a role in triggering cancer.
Researchers led by Dr. Lital Keinan-Boker at the University of Haifa in Israel compared cancer rates for two groups of European-born Israeli Jews: 258,048 who left Europe after the war and 57,496 who emigrated before or during the conflict.
Both groups have higher incidence rates for cancer than other Jewish and non-Jewish ethnic groups in Israel.
But the researchers found that Jews who spent World War Two in Europe were at least 17 percent more likely to develop cancer than those who left before or during the war.
The results are important, the researchers said, because many Jews who survived World War Two in Europe were also victims of the Holocaust - the systematic state-sponsored persecution and murder of about 6 million Jews by Germany's Nazi regime and its collaborators.
They endured severe starvation, extreme mental stress and exposure to cold and infectious agents.
"A possible explanation for the differences in cancer incidence observed among the various Jewish ethnic groups may be differences in their specific exposure to the traumas of the Holocaust," Keinan-Boker and his team wrote.
"These observations may have direct impact on the health of World War Two Jewish survivors and thus the care required from their caregivers in Israel and elsewhere."
Among the cancers that were more common were colorectal, breast and lung cancers.
Increased cancer risks were greatest among the youngest - those born from 1940 to 1945. These younger men 3.5 times higher rates of cancer and younger women 2.33 times more.
Cancer rates higher among youngest survivors
Actual Holocaust experiences could not be determined, said the researchers.
But they said higher cancer rates among the youngest of the World War Two survivors could suggest that the hardship and adversity of the Holocaust raised the risk of cancer risk by altering growth and hormone patterns in children.
The study's assertion that starvation could contribute to higher cancer rates appeared to conflict with other research suggesting that sharp reductions in food intake could extend longevity and curtail cancer risk.
But Stephen Hursting and Michele Forman, U.S. researchers at the University of Texas who wrote a commentary to accompany the Israeli findings, said European Jews exposed to the Holocaust would have faced a host of debilitating factors besides starvation.
"These multifaceted stressful conditions were very different than the experimental conditions characteristic of the majority of the published caloric restriction studies in animal models," Hursting and Forman wrote.
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This study and others like it effectively show again how stress causes so many health problems which can be triggered at childhood. Perhaps divorcing parents who cause their children to suffer to get back at the other should wake up and realise that the stress and damage they are causing now can affect the innocent ones for the rest of their lives. Peace is what counts, in families, amongst friends, neighbours etc. Let us learn from those poor people who went through the Shoah and let us learn not to make others suffer, so that we never ever stoop even close to those perpetrators of pure evil.
I guess the term is just too vague: what is a survivor? From anecdotal evidence, I see that two family members lived to be 90 (the brother) and 100 (the sister). He was in a work crew sent to the Eastern front, and she was at Thieresenstadt, and got out with her four kids and husband. He was the smoker. He died before her of a heart attack. One of her kids got MS and then died of an undiagnosed bowel cancer. But what about my non-Jewish uncle, a POW in Poland who also starved? He died of a stroke at 60. My father, in a unit in more combat against the Germans than any other in the war, almost continuously on the move for three years, died of heart disease. He could never stop smoking, plagued with PTSD. My Ashkenazi side has little cancer. Many of them survived the war in various camps because Hungarians were taken later. But I think they also have fortunate genes (to allow Aunt Bella to live to be 100). Cancer runs in families, with or without the Holocaust history.
State of Israel. The sooner we will disappear the less they will have to return, if at all.
This premise is ridiculous since all of the survivors are in their eighties. A goy like me should be so lucky to acquire cancer at that age. These medical studies are insane.
Don't get me wrong here, I haven't read the report, but I'd like to know how they accounted for other factors known to cause cancer. Meaning, going through the Holocaust probably caused a lot of survivors to take up smoking to deal with the stress involved. From what we know in modern science, it's more likely that the lung cancer was attained from a smoking habit than from surviving in a concentration camp. However, we also know that high levels of stress can result in unhealthy effects. Is it such a stress to say that the highest levels of stress had a permanent effect that took its toll decades later? We just don't know - what should we really take from this study?