The study involved 708 women in the Australian Breast Cancer Family Study who had been newly-diagnosed with localised breast cancer and tracked them over eight years to see whether their cancer relapsed. A quarter died over the period.
Levels of depression, anxiety and other factors like fatalist outlook, avoidance, anger, and feelings of hopelessness also were assessed.
"Essentially, the bottom line is we didn't find any correlation at all between these issues and whether their cancer came back," Professor Phillips said.
"This goes against what the vast majority of patients believe."
Interestingly, women who had an anxious preoccupation with their cancer were more likely to get a relapse, but once the researchers adjusted for all the things known to cause recurrence, like size and grade of the tumour, this association disappeared, she said.
"The women who were anxiously preoccupied were the ones that had the worst tumours, so they were anxious and preoccupied for a reason, Professor Phillips said.
