The Holocaust survivors, that is, the persecution and murder of some six million Jews who sponsored the Nazi regime and its collaborators, were exposed to different factors that, according to some studies, can favor the development of cancer. A team of researchers coordinated by Siegal Sadetzki, from the Chaim Sheba Medical Center, in Israel, asks in an essay published in the journal Cancer to what extent the lack of food, poor hygienic conditions, exposure to different infectious diseases and the continuous The stress they faced could have contributed to this condition in some of them.
To determine this, Sadetzki and his collaborators, who studied the evolution of 152,622 of these survivors for more than 45 years , classified them based on two criteria: whether or not they had received compensation for their sufferings and whether during the war they had lived in a country ruled by Germany or in an unoccupied one. Thus, they found out that 22% of those who had been compensated were diagnosed with cancer, compared to 16% of those who had not. The scientists also observed that among the members of the first group the risk of suffering from any type of cancer was 6% higher. This amount increased up to 12% if it was colorectal, and up to 37% if it was lung.
For their part, survivors who had lived in Nazi-run countries were 8% more likely to develop a tumor – 12% more, again, in the case of lung cancer – than those who had not. In a statement, these experts note that they did not observe an increased risk of breast or gynecological cancers among women.
As the researchers explain, the data obtained show the effect that different combined factors can have on the appearance of this disease. In an editorial published in the same journal, it is noted that parallels could be drawn between the scenario described by the authors and the development of cancer related to other extreme social phenomena, such as the deprivations that ethnic minorities may experience over time.
Image: Arnold E. Samuelson / National Archives
Cancer Risk Among Holocaust Survivors in Israel — A Nationwide Study. Siegal Sadetzki, Angela Chetrit, Laurence S. Freedman, Nina Hakak, Micha Barchana, Raphael Catane, and Mordechai Shani. CANCER; Published Online: July 10, 2017 (DOI: 10.1002 / cncr.30783).
