Remember when you were young and there were days when you just felt you wanted to lie in bed all day and watch TV or just play with your favorite dolls in the privacy of your own little room - and then your parents came and told you to go outside and play? Well, it seems that their advice might have been more than just a gentle incentive to enjoy the early years of your life and get down to as much running around outside as possible. A recent study has shown that exercises during childhood and adolescence can prevent the development of breast cancer later on in life. The sooner you start exercising, the lower the risk of disease - so it looks like running around outside does have its other outcomes on top of the regular cuts and bruises.

"This really points to the benefit of sustained physical activity from adolescence through the adult years, to get the maximum benefit", explained Dr. Graham Colditz of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, who fronted the research. The study was conducted on 65,000 nurses aged between 24 and 42, who had to answer questionnaires about the type and frequency of physical activity they had been having since the age of 12.

The results of the study were published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute and emphasized that women who had an active physical life since their adolescence were 23 % less likely to develop pre-menopausal breast cancer than women who did not exercise at an early age. Specialists say that the exercises between the ages of 12 and 22 have the biggest influence on the development of the disease.

However, do not get alarmed, as „exercise" doesn't refer to hours of exercise a day - although, as we all know, healthy children and adolescents should be encouraged to run around and engage in as much physical activity as they like. The women who were involved in the study declared they had averaged around 3 hours and 15 minutes of running a week or 13 hours a week of walking.

The explanation is relatively simple: specialists say that moderate weekly exercise helps prevent breast cancer because of the decrease it marks in estrogen and other hormone levels. "Women who engage in physical activity not only during adolescence but during adulthood lower their risk", stated Dr. Alpa Patel, a cancer prevention specialist at the American Cancer Society.

To sum up, it is essential that we start young and do not turn into couch potatoes as we get past our teens. Moderate physical activity - jogging, cycling, swimming, playing tennis, even walking instead of taking the bus or taking the stairs instead of the elevator - may prove to bring more benefits to our health than we might imagine. And again as one of my friends says, a little exercise never hurt anybody. You know where the park or the gym is.