14 DAY TRIAL // Women who take the time to exercise on a regular basis are less likely to develop breast cancer at some point in their lives, a study published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology says.
For the time being, breast cancer is considered by specialists to be the most common type of invasive cancer to affect women in all parts of the world.
Because of this, the news that a woman's risks of being affected by this condition can be reduced with the help of regular physical activity alone proved to be a head-turner.
The researchers now claiming that exercise slashes cancer risk base their affirmations on their having discovered that physical activity (aerobics in particular) changes the way in which estrogen is broken down and metabolized in the body.
More precisely, they say that, as far as they can tell, physical activity ups the so-called good to bad ratio of estrogen metabolites inside the body.
This in turn reduces a woman's risk of developing breast cancer.
Data suggesting that regular aerobic exercise ups said ratio were collected while conducting a clinical trial involving a total of 391 women volunteers.
The women were all young, healthy and premenopausal. Medical News Today quotes Mindy S. Kurzer, Ph.D., currently working as a professor in the Department of Food Science and Nutrition at the University of Minnesota in Saint Paul, who commented on the findings of this study as follows:
“Observational studies suggest physical activity lowers breast cancer risk, but there are no clinical studies that explain the mechanism behind this.”
“Ours is the first study to show that aerobic exercise influences the way our bodies break down estrogens to produce more of the 'good' metabolites that lower breast cancer risk.”
Presently, the researchers are unable to explain why it is that aerobic exercise affects the way a woman's body deals with estrogen.
It is to be expected that further investigations will shed more light on the underlying mechanisms of this phenomenon.