Being physically active and avoiding a sedentary lifestyle is the best way to stay healthy and prevent diseases, including cancer. This is corroborated by a recent macro-study, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, which has discovered that increasing levels of physical exercise could substantially reduce the risk of developing breast cancer.
The research, which used genetic analysis to establish a causal link between activity levels and cancer risk, included 130,957 women, of whom 69,838 had locally spread or invasive tumors, 6,667 tumors that had not yet spread, and the rest were healthy. Participants’ levels of physical activity were analyzed and also related to whether they had gone through menopause or not, and by cancer type, stage, and grade.
The results observed when putting all the data in relation were that in all types and stages of the disease, doing more physical exercise and spending less time sitting were found to be associated with a 41% lower risk of invasive breast cancer, regardless of whether or not they had passed the menopause, the type of tumor, its grade and stage.
Sitting for a long time increases the risk of breast cancer
In addition, they found that vigorous physical activity three or more days a week was associated with a 38% lower chance of breast cancer, compared with no vigorous activity at all. Finally, those who spent the most time sitting had a 104% increased risk of triple-negative breast cancer.
Spending a lot of time sitting increases up to 104% the risk of developing triple negative breast cancer
“The effect is more consistent for physical exercise in general and less so for vigorous exercise. Another important fact of the study is that, thanks to its sample size, it offers information by tumor subtype, confirming that exercise has a protective role for all subtypes”, declared Marina Pollán, director of the National Center for Epidemiology, the center of the Instituto de Salud Carlos III, which did not participate in the study, to SMC Spain.
According to the researchers, the explanation behind their findings could be related to the numerous causal pathways between physical activity and breast cancer risk, such as being overweight or obese, altered metabolism, inflammation or sex hormones.
“Increasing physical activity and reducing sedentary time are already recommended for cancer prevention. Our study adds further evidence that such behavioral changes are likely to reduce the incidence of future breast cancer rates.”
Until now, other similar observational studies questioned whether the lower breast cancer rates were caused by physical activity or whether that relationship could be confounded by other factors, “for example, women who tend to be more physically active they could also have healthier lifestyles in other ways, ”said Brigid Lynch, professor at Cancer Council Victoria and lead author of the study. Lynch confirms that this new study “suggests that it is indeed a causal effect: physical activity reduces the risk of developing breast cancer.”
One limitation of the study, which drew data from the UK Biobank and 76 other studies from the Breast Cancer Association Consortium (BCAC), was that it only included data from women of European descent.
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