Cancer diagnosis and side effects of treatment are stressful experiences for the patients. Moreover, as one of the unresolved issues, the results of studies on the association between psychological stress and cancer incidence rates have conflicting results. The present study was aimed to investigate the association between stress and cancer in previous studies. The current study has used systematic research tools in electronic databases of national and international research-scientific journals to systematically review studies and search for the research history through using the keywords “Stress” and “Cancer” from 2016 to 2019. Results have been reported qualitatively. The review first started by going through all summaries and the full text of the previous articles, followed by irrelevant omission papers, and the final analysis was performed on ten articles. Since stress in the reviewed papers had been investigated by different scales, there was no sufficient homogeneity in these studies to combine the data; hence, they were just reported. Among these studies, there was a significant association between mental stress and the onset of pain and recurrence of cancer in seven studies, and there was no association in the other three. Given the findings of the present paper review, it appears necessary to adopt appropriate methods for identifying risk factors, prevention, treatment, and stress management on the patients. Most studies have shown an association between stress and the incidence and recurrence of cancer. Nevertheless, prospective analytical studies with controlling the intervention variables are required to clarify this association.