Psychosocial factors and breast cancer: a critical reevaluation of established hypotheses

The Bahnson psychosocial risk profile was reexamined for breast cancer screening. The questionnaire was presented to 3,306 women who came to the consultation hour in a hospital for prevention and early detection. It was administered prior to knowledge of the diagnosis. Newly detected breast cancer cases were compared to matched groups of healthy and benign controls on several psychosocial scales. Discrimination between these groups was rather poor, showing the questionnaire's inadequacy to measure factors relevant in discriminating between this study's newly detected cancer cases and controls. Possible explanations for the "poor" results are discussed.