New research suggests that if girls and young women exercise regularly it may cut their risk of breast cancer before the menopause by up to a quarter.

A massive new study of nearly 65,000 women published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute and carried out by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis and Harvard University in Boston, showed that keeping active can help protect against developing the disease before the age of 50, compared to those who are less active.

 

It seems that high levels of activity between the ages of 12 to 22 offer the most protection. The study which is the largest of its kind found that most active women were running or doing around three hours of exercise a week, with the total amount of exercise they did more important than the type of exercise they did or its intensity. It is thought that exercise can help lower breast cancer risk because it lowers levels of the hormone oestrogen which is known to increase breast cancer risk.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 at 4:50 am and is filed under Breast Cancer, Exercise, In the News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.