Breast Cancer Takes Toll on Partner's Mental Health
Sept. 27, 2010— -- When a mammogram revealed a lump in Christine Amatulli's breast, her husband Dominick said he couldn't even process it. Having already lost a sister to breast cancer, he had to mentally "go to another place" to cope.
"In order to be supportive, you have to man up," said Dominick, a 54-year-old from Merrick, NY. "If you're going to pieces all the time while she's in pieces, it's makes it harder."
But despite putting up a strong front, Dominick struggled to hold it together. Friends told him he looked terrible, and even Christine worried about how he would react to any more bad news.
There's no disputing breast cancer's immense psychological impact on newly-diagnosed patients. But the subtler and often prolonged collateral damage suffered by patients' partners is raising concern among cancer clinicians.
"It's not just the person sitting in the bed, or the person sitting getting chemo that's the patient. It's the entire family -- the husband included," said Amy Sales, a clinical social worker at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center in Baltimore, Md.
But like Dominick, men often feel compelled to put on a strong face and might not reach out readily for support.
"The stress that's placed upon a male and the inability to release that stress in healthy environments is creating more health concerns and issues for them in the long run," Sales said.
This is emphasized by the sobering results from a study of more than 20,000 men whose partners developed breast cancer, which suggest men whose partners die from breast cancer are up to four times more likely to suffer from mood disorders like depression and panic attacks than men in the general population. The study was published online in the journal Cancer.
Over the 13-year study period, 180 of the 20,538 men were hospitalized for affective disorders such as depression. That compared with 12,185 hospitalizations among the 1,142,000 men whose female partners did not develop breast cancer.
The risk of hospitalization for affective disorders increased by more than 50 percent among men whose female partners whose breast cancer relapsed.
