Recent research shows that exercising benefits women fighting breast cancer, and indications are that being more active could greatly reduce the chances of the cancer coming back.
“The magnitude of the benefits seen with increased activity was quite substantial,” says study author Dr Thomas Budd from Cleveland Clinic in the United States.
“There was somewhere between a 40% to 50% chance of reducing the relative risk of the cancer coming back and even greater degrees in reduction of death.”
More than 1,000 patients took part in the study.
He says that while it is known that exercising can be beneficial, researchers wanted to collect more evidence about how it could impact someone both before and after the cancer diagnosis.
He shares that the researchers learned that doing something as simple as walking for half-an-hour each day made a big difference.
It is important to note that the exercise was done in addition to standard cancer treatments, he stresses.
Dr Budd adds that the data suggests it is never too late to start exercising if you have been diagnosed with breast cancer.
“Patients who did the worst were those who had very little activity,” he says.
“Another important finding was that patients who were inactive before treatment, but who became active one or two years later, also had decreases in recurrence of breast cancer and death that were similar in size, or magnitude, with patients who had great degrees of activity.”
Dr Budd and the research team plan to continue studying the science behind exercising, but in the meantime, he encourages everyone to get moving.
The US National Institute of Health (NIH) study, which was a joint venture between SWOG Cancer Research Network, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Cleveland Clinic and others, was published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
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