It’s a woman worst fear: Getting diagnosed with breast cancer. Yet statistics show as women get older, their risk of breast cancer rises–by as much as a 1 in 13 chance by the time they hit age 70.
But now a new meta-analysis presented at the 9th European Breast Cancer Conference shows there may be an easy way to reduce this risk: By exercising.
“Previous studies have suggested that women who take regular exercise might be less likely to get breast cancer,” says Grant Stewart, a contributor to Best Health, part of the British Medical Journal network. “But it hasn’t been clear just how big the preventive effect of exercise might be. We also know that taking hormone replacement therapy (HRT) increases women’s chances of breast cancer.”
The Study
Pooling together data from 37 studies that examined women with breast cancer, researchers looked for two connections–how exercise affected a woman’s breast cancer risk and how HRT, or hormone replacement therapy, affected this risk. To do so, they specifically looked at the women’s exercise habits and if they took HRT, a task which took considerable time since the conglomerate of studies totaled 4.3 million women.
From there, they evaluated their overall risk based on their exercise levels, and the news was good for those who exercised the most.
For those who exercised regularly, their risk of getting breast cancer was lower compared to those who lived a sedentary lifestyle. But for those who exercised the most, or for at least an hour a day, they faced a 12 percent lower risk.
“Compared with those who exercised the least, the most active women (those who exercised for about an hour a day) had a 12 percent lower chance of getting breast cancer,” says Stewart. “A 12 percent reduction in your chances of breast cancer may not seem like much. But when you consider how common the disease is in older women, 12 percent might look pretty worthwhile.”
As a downside, however, researchers also found that women who took HRT didn’t experience any benefits when they did exercise, suggesting HRT may cancel the effects of exercise on breast cancer. This didn’t necessarily surprise researchers, who have known HRT has a history of increasing a woman’s breast cancer risk–but obviously it has them concerned.
“Taking HRT seemed to cancel out this beneficial effect of exercise altogether,” says Stewart. “This is a large study that seems to clarify the results of previous research on exercise, HRT, and breast cancer. But it hasn’t yet been published in a scientific journal, so we can’t check its methods as carefully as we can with published articles.”
What You Should Do
It’s a tough call: While HRT can lower symptoms of menopause, it also raises your breast cancer risk. On the other hand, exercising more reduces your risk of cancer. So what should you do?
“It’s not something to say, ‘Oh, I’ve never done sports why do that right now?'” says Mathieu Boniol, a research director at the Strathclyde Institute for Global Public Health in Lyon, France. “We now have evidence that it could still be beneficial. And it’s cheap. It’s a very cheap way to do prevention of breast cancer.”
Readers: How often do you exercise every week?
Sources:
Exercise Cuts Breast Cancer Risk for All Women? – NPR.org
Exercise Reduces Breast Cancer Risk; HRT Raises It – BMJ.com
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