Could depression cause fibroids or fibroids cause depression?
Personally I think without question fibroids can bring about depression, or even if they don’t necessarily bring on depression directly, they will certainly do nothing to help mitigate depressive feelings; and the toll they can take on you physically can definitely affect you mentally. Whether or not depression can cause fibroids to grow in the first place, that’s a completely different discussion.
I know I’ve come across material that suggests stress causes fibroids to grow. Of course this is not scientific; but in what ever manner stress would lead to the development of fibroid tumors, whether directly or indirectly, it would seem that depression should be capable of doing the same.
I do doubt strongly that stress or depression can make stuff grow in your body. I think there needs to be something more concrete. When you really think about it, stress and depression are completely mental, and the idea that either one can make tumors grow in a woman’s uterus would be nearly impossible to prove without some physical thing you can look at and examine and say, this particular chemical or physical manifestation of stress and/or depression created fibroids via x y or z process.
I’m willing to believe that it’s possible to mess with the chemicals of your body just by elevating your stress or by being depressed; but I don’t think it would happen independently of anything you are putting in your body, whether it’s stuff you’re ingesting or stuff you’re inhaling. I think stress and depression could possibly prep your body so to speak, so that when the thing or things that cause the fibroids to develop entered your body through your respiratory or digestive system or both, the environment inside of you was just the right environment for the tumors to grow.
A lot of the women in my family have had fibroids. My grandmother had a hysterectomy. My mother lived with hers and saw them shrink after menopause. One sister had a hysterectomy. Another sister had a myomectomy. Another sister has had her fibroids since she was a teenager but hers haven’t caused her any major problems. Depression and/or severe stress is definitely a common theme for all the women in my family who have had this problem (the ones I know about at any rate). When you consider the number of us who have had fibroids, you would tend to look more towards the genetics factor. We would be a good case reference for anyone who wanted to argue strongly for this being a genetic thing. Clearly genes play a role for some people, but I think it’s important to understand what role it plays, what exactly gets passed on through DNA and how that thing, what ever it is, then leads to the eventual development of fibroids in offspring. Unfortunately I am not a scientist so I cannot suggest any possible explanations.
I find it difficult to understand how scientists can be sure there’s a genetic link and yet not be able to identify the cause of fibroids. It leaves me tempted to question the genetic factor, but then I have to come up with a rational explanation for why so many of my siblings developed this problem. I guess at the end of the day the genetic factor makes more sense than to say it’s because we all had stressful lives, have pretty intense and passionate personalities, and have all battled depression. We all also for long periods ingested the same foods, breathe in the same air so there would be enough common elements just in diet and external chemical environment to expose us all to the fibroid causing agents if these agents are in food or in the air we breathe. The same can be said for the suggested race factor. Genetics would not necessarily need to be the only explanation for why multiple women from the same family, or large numbers of women from a particular cultural background or from a particular region might have fibroids; but I suppose genetics is a more sensible and easier to swallow explanation than the idea that depression or stress could cause fibroids.
at some point when I get the funds.
