If you made a New Years resolution to begin exercising on a regular basis, heres yet another reason to stick to it. New research concludes that consistent exercising is associated with a lower risk from dying of colon cancer.
One in every seventeen people in the United States will develop the disease. Deaths from this cancer rank third after lung and prostate cancer for men and third after lung and breast cancer for women.
This new study in support of exercise was conducted by researchers at the Siteman Cancer Center at Washington University School of Medicine and Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis. Although we all know exercise is good for us, their research is the first to show that physical activity can make colon cancer a less deadly disease.
Researchers form Washington University collaborated with the American Cancer Society Cancer Society Prevention Study II (CPS II) and reviewed whether changes in physical activity influenced either the incidence of colon cancer or the risk of death from the disease. They looked at more than 150,000 men and women in order to see the connection between how exercise affected colon cancer.
A comparison was made between the subjects levels of physical activity between 1982 and 1997. Then the researchers linked those activity levels to the rate of colon cancer diagnoses between 1998 and 2005, as well as to the number of colon cancer deaths that occurred between 1998 and 2006. The researchers discovered that people who exercised consistently for at least 10 years had the lowest risk of colon cancer death.
