Exercise and breast cancer
From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I’m Ira Dreyfuss with HHS HealthBeat.
African-American women who exercise regularly seem to have a lower risk of breast cancer. Boston University researchers found this in 16 years of follow-up of more than 44,000 African-American women in the Black Women’s Health Study.
Lead researcher Lynn Rosenberg:
“Women who exercised seven or more hours a week had a 25 percent lower incidence of breast cancer than sedentary women.”
Exercisers did things like swimming, running, aerobics and basketball. Women who did brisk walking also benefited – but not women who walked at a normal pace.
These findings for black women are in line with what other researchers had found earlier in white women.
The study in the journal Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers & Prevention was supported by the National Institutes of Health.
Learn more at healthfinder.gov.
HHS HealthBeat is a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I’m Ira Dreyfuss.