Exercise reduces breast cancer risk in black women
Posted on: Wednesday, 16 November 2005, 13:43 CST
By Anthony J. Brown, MD
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - With a few hours of exercise each week, black women can reduce their risk of breast cancer to the same extent that white women can, new research suggests.
"The results indicate that the more exercise you do over your lifetime, the greater your reduction in breast cancer risk will be," lead author Dr. Leslie Bernstein, from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, told Reuters Health. "In general, I think you need to do 3 to 4 hours of exercise per week to see a strong protective effect."
Until now, "there really had not been a study of the breast cancer-preventing effects of exercise in African American women," Bernstein said. "The results indicate that they glean as much benefit from physical activity as white women do."
The findings, which appear in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, are based on a comparison of lifetime recreational exercise between 4,538 patients with breast cancer and 4,649 women without breast cancer. Roughly, a third of subjects in each group were black and the remainder was white.
As lifetime exercise activity rose, the risk of breast cancer fell, the report indicates, with no statistically significant difference noted between black and white women. Compared with inactivity, annual lifetime exercise activity that exceeded the average level for active comparison subjects reduced their risk of developing breast cancer by 20 percent.
However, physical activity did not help prevent breast cancer in women who had a close relative with the malignancy. On the other hand, the beneficial effect of exercise on breast cancer risk was not affected by disease stage, tumor type or other related factors.
As to how exercise reduces the risk or breast cancer, Bernstein said that the major hypothesis is that it involves changes in the hormones estrogen and progesterone. "However, there are other possible mechanisms that are being explored," including changes in insulin and fats.
Bernstein said her group is currently involved in a similar study looking at the impact of physical activity on the risk of other cancers in women.
SOURCE: Journal of the National Cancer Institute, November 16, 2005.
Source: REUTERS
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