Keep Moving! Your Life May Depend On It
26 Jan 2009
Continuing the theme of “what you can do for your health for virtually no cost”, here is information especially useful for people dealing with cancer, but applicable to everyone.
Just about the best thing you can do for yourself is stay active. A small amount of light exercise such as easy-paced walking for a total of 1 to 2 hours a week has been found to improve outcomes for breast cancer and colon cancer patients.
For breast cancer, a study of 3,000 nurses did not show any further improvement as a result of extra exercise beyond 1 to 2 hours per week, but the investigators pointed out that this may have been a limitation of the study design, rather than an absence of benefit. The key take-away though is that even small amounts of activity resulted in a significant improvement in outcomes.
Another study published in 2008 in the Journal of Oncology found that active colon cancer patients (defined in this case as people who did the equivalent of 6 hours walking per week) had a 47% improvement in recurrence and mortality risks compared with inactive patients.
The message - keep moving! It will improve your health and the quality of your life, and it won’t damage your pocketbook.
