Every month, I’ll be highlighting breast cancer
research that is going on RIGHT NOW! Harvested from different websites, journals
and podcasts, I’ll translate them into understandable English and share them with
you. Today: Breast Cancer and Exercise
So once again it rears its ugly head; the word dreaded by more
Americans than embraced by Americans; the single most powerful shaking word in Western
Civilization: exercise. Body shaming. (Do you know that even when I google “body
shaming” it’s all women; when I google “male body shaming”, I STILL get lots of
women…apparently fat men are totally OK with themselves; and women still love
them…do I detect a slight double standard here? (ESPECIALLY with advertisers…)
At any rate, despite our horror of exercising and the efforts our society
expends driving us to avoid it, the science is in [and has been in for ages – I’ve
got more than 20 articles on this blog that deal with exercise (there are lots
of duplicates as I do ENCORE’S every other week): https://breastcancerreaper.blogspot.com/search?q=exercise&updated-max=2015-01-17T04:52:00-08:00&max-results=20&start=31&by-date=false]
– here’s yet another study that indicates that exercise helps fight breast
cancer!
The study was quite clear: “Doing the minimum amount of recommended
exercise per week — 2.5 hours — both before and after being diagnosed with
breast cancer with a high risk of recurrence is linked to better survival and a
lower risk of recurrence, according to a study. The research was published
online on April 2, 2020, in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Read
the abstract of “Physical activity, before, during and after chemotherapy for
high-risk breast cancer: relationships with survival” by following the link below
in Resources.
Women who followed the national guidelines for how MUCH we should be
exercising – two and a half hours or more PER WEEK (really? Let’s break it
down: you have a possible 168 each week available to you (2.5 hrs/168 hrs = a
bit more than one percent of your hours should be spent exercising.
“BUT I HAVE TO SLEEP!!!!”
OK, let’s say 8 hours a sleep a day per week (“Yeah, right, like I
sleep THAT much! I have kids!”) = 112 AWAKE hours. So just need to sneak out a
two and a half of those and you can “cut your risk of recurrence BY HALF!!!
(55%).
Sneak those two and a half hours of medium effort to work out and you
lower your risk of DYING by MORE THAN HALF (68%).
Even if you recuperated AFTER the surgery, chemo, and rehab were done
and you started doing something active for two and a half hour A WEEK, you cut
your risk of recurrence almost in half (46%) and the risk of outright dying by
a bit less than half (43%)
Even if you’ve been a lounge lizard (ladies) or a couch potato (guys)
your entire freaking life, doing TWO PERCENT MORE ACTIVITY than you did before
your cancer can drop the risk of the cancer growing back or dying before your
time.
I could list ways
to get more exercise into your life, but anyone reading this can probably do
the same thing and come up with better ideas for your geographic and climate
area. According to the study, the conclusion is that (in science talk): “Meeting
the minimum guidelines for physical activity both before diagnosis and after
treatment appears to be associated with statistically significantly reduced
hazards of recurrence and mortality among breast cancer patients.”
In plain English:
get a move on and live longer!
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