Mental illness can be an early sign of brain tumors

People with mental disorders are more likely to be diagnosed with brain tumors and lung cancer and to develop those cancers at younger ages than people without mental illness, researchers have found.

Because mentally ill people are known to smoke more than the general population, the higher incidence of lung cancer was not surprising, said Dr. Caroline Carney, lead author of the study and an associate professor of psychiatry and medicine at the Indiana University School of Medicine. But the apparent link between mental illness and brain tumors was unexpected.

“We think that mental symptoms -- a change in personality, or mental problems -- may be among the first symptoms that a brain tumor causes, before people develop other neurological symptoms,” Carney said.

She and her colleagues analyzed five years of medical insurance claims for more than 700,000 cancer patients, ages 18 to 64, living in Iowa and South Dakota. The researchers did not include patients who submitted a mental health claim after a cancer diagnosis, in case the diagnosis influenced their mental health.

“If dementia, delirium, confusion or memory loss occur in a young person, or psychotic symptoms are occurring for the first time in a middle-aged or older person,” Carney said, “that is a clinical marker that a medical work-up should be done.”

Dr. Ken Duckworth, medical director for the nonprofit National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, said Carney’s findings jibed with patterns already found in some mental illnesses.

Duckworth added that the study could encourage primary care physicians to think of people more holistically.

Results of this study are published in the current issue of Psychosomatic Medicine.