Skin cancer risk for adults becomes greater.

• Position: Childhood Neglect - Brief article

Skin cancer patients whose childhood included periods of neglect or maltreatment are at a much greater risk for their cancers to return when they face a major stressful event, according to a study in Archives of General Psychiatry. The research suggests that such experiences during a person's youth can set a lower level of immune response for life, which, in turn, might make that individual more susceptible to the kind of cancers that often are fought successfully by the immune system, so-called immunogenic tumors.

While the research focused on patients with a fairly benign form of skin cancer--basal cell carcinoma (BCC)--the findings appear as a warning for patients to be more vigilant in concerns over their health for the rest of their lives.

"This is the first study to show that troubled early parental experiences, in combination with a severe life event in the past year, predict local immune responses to a BCC tumor," writes Christopher Fagundes, first author of the paper. "This...