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The Schalling Sifneos Personality Scale (SSPS) and the Middlesex Hospital Questionnaire (MHQ) have been used in 381 women just before mammography at the Breast Center of the Radiology Institute, University of Bari (Italy). Of the 200 women who accepted to complete the questionnaires 13 were found positive for cancer. Student's t test comparison of the mean SSPS and MHQ scores of the positive for cancer with the negative showed that women with breast cancer have more pronounced alexithymic but not neurotic traits. Our findings suggest that patients with cancer may have something in common with those suffering from so-called psychosomatic pathologies who have a constrained imagination and fantasy and difficulty in verbalizing their emotions. Thus, this study indicates a relationship between alexithymia and cancer.

Several authors point out how frequent and dangerous the emotional complications are that sometimes come across in the plain psychiatric pathology of artificial insemination by donors (AID)1–12. This risk can be easily understood if one considers the deep emotional and psychological roots that the act of procreating has for women as well as for men. Procreating through the semen of a third person, the donor, can have deep emotional consequences, which not all subjects are able to evaluate, and above all after AID they are not able to accept and integrate the emotional consequences in their emotional life as individuals and as couples.