Psychological Features of Breast Cancer in Mexican Women I: Personality Traits and Stress Symptoms

Breast cancer (BC) is one of the leading causes of death among women worldwide. Identification of susceptible women might help us reduce BC-related deaths. Traditionally women's susceptibility to BC has been estimated based on family, reproductive and nutritional histories and/or genotyping. Unfortunately, predictions made based on all these factors remain imprecise. Research conducted over the past decades supports the premise that patients displaying some personality traits are prone to develop cancer. Nevertheless, conflicting results have been published. We then conducted a study aimed at evaluating relationships between specific personality traits and different types of breast pathology. This approach aimed at evaluating whether personality profiling, in conjunction with other parameters might help us, in the near future, to identify more accurately Mexican women susceptible to develop BC. As a first step towards this goal, we asked whether healthy women and patients having signs of benign breast pathology or cancer shared or not specific personality traits. We used the Courtauld Emotional Control Total Score, the Weinberger Adjustment Inventory and the Symptoms of Stress Inventory to identify personality traits. Our results indicated that women diagnosed with benign or malign breast pathology share low restraint, low global stress symptoms, low physical stress symptoms, low restraint-defensiveness composite and high distress before diagnosis. This outcome was independent of the educational level, as well as of family, reproductive and nutritional histories, supporting that the weight of the psychological traits is greater than that of the latter variables, at least in our sample.