Anyone who has followed research about CFS or who has been sick long enough should be well aware that the immune system abnormalities found in CFS should raise the risk of cancer.
Every year I go for my annual visit to Paul Cheney. One of the forms his office hands out every year is a list of medical tests that he wants his patients to have done on a fairly frequent basis (i.e. blood work every year, chest X-ray every two years, upper endoscopy every two years, colonoscopy every two years, pelvic ultrasound every two years). It doesn't take a genius to read between the lines about his rationale for recommending these tests with such frequency.
I suspect he has seen cancer develop at an elevated frequency in his practice.
He also used to talk quite a lot about all the immune system abnormalities known to occur in CFS, including the pronounced shift from TH1 to TH2 immunity, low NK-cell function, high oxidative stress, and inadequate P450 conjugation, that, regardless of underlying cause, theoretically raise the risk of cancer.
He once joked to me that private insurance companies will both deny disability claims and life insurance coverage to anyone with a diagnosis of CFS. His point was that these insurers are being self-contradictory in their actions. But my takeaway is that I am more likely to die at an early age than a healthy person.
Similarly, Leonard Jason wrote a paper a few years ago which noted people with CFS who die from cancer tend to be a lot younger than for the general population. Specifically, average age of death from cancer among CFS patients was only 48, compared to 72 for the entire US population. Although this doesn't prove that CFS causes cancer (since it doesn't measure incidence rates), it is cautionary.
A cancer diagnosis would scare the hell out of me. My life may be fairly miserable, but it still seems better than the alternative. That said, I feel somewhat resigned to the fact that at some point my illness will progress to a life-threatening illness.
