Physical Activity Decreases Your Risk Of Colorectal Cancer

Group ride on 090219 - definitely miss those rides

I was very active in primary school. Other than swimming occasionally and playing police and thief (running), I also played football, basketball, table tennis and badminton. It was only in secondary school that I started to be more serious with cross country running and athletics.

How about you? Try to recall what you were doing as a teenager. A recent study suggest that how active you were back then and and how you've maintained it till now is important when gauging your risk of colorectal cancer.

Physical activity during adolescence helps lower risk of colorectal cancer. If you have been able to continue daily moderate physical exercise well into adulthood, the results are even better.

The study showed that those who did at least an hour of physical activity daily from 12 to 22 years had a reduced risk of adenoma (polyps or a benign tumor formed from glandular tissue) by 7 percent compared to those who were less active. (Polyps are considered a precursor of colorectal cancer).

Those who started physical activity as adults reduced risk by 9 percent. However, those are were active as teens and continued being active for at least an hour as adults reduced their adenoma risk by 24 percent!

The researchers analysed the data of 28,250 female subjects aged 25 to 42. Physical activity, nutrition, hormones were among some of the data studied.

The researchers suggest that being physically active reduces the risk of colorectal cancer since it helps weight management and control and thereby affects insulin resistance and inflammation as they are involved in promotion and progression of cancer.

I would be very interested if the researchers measured how intense or hard the physical activities were. And how often were these higher intensity sessions and whether they made any difference.

However, this study did not analyse that. The authors did mentioned that previous studies have shown that moderate to vigorous activities were associated with lower bowel, breast and endometrium cancers.

Take home message is that there is a cumulative effect of physical activity as we grow older. Even if you have been inactive as a child, it is not too late to start now. And the longer you maintain that physical activity, the better off you'll be.


Reference

Rezande L, Lee DH, Keum N et al, (2019). Physical Activity During Adolescence And Risk Of Colorectal Adenoma Later In Life: Results From The Nurses' Health Study II. Br J Cancer. 121: 86-94. DOI: 10.1038/s41416-019-0454-1.

Picture above taken yesterday by Dennis Thong. I still try to be as active as possible daily with at least one complete rest day a week.

You should too.