14 DAY TRIAL // Sitting around doing nothing after a hard day's work might sound like a dream come true, but a new study cautions that, according to evidence at hand, this sort of behavior ups cancer risk.
The study, published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention, is based on data obtained while monitoring 146,000 volunteers between the years 1992 and 2009. During this time, 18,555 of the men and 12,236 of the women participants were diagnosed with cancer.
Study leader Alpa Patel with the American Cancer Society explains that, when the team looked at what the volunteers did in their spare time, they found a correlation between leisure time spent sitting and a 10% higher cancer risk. The association held when variables like BMI were factored in.
Interestingly, this association between spending more leisure time sitting and an increased cancer risk was only documented in the case of the women study participants. No such link was obvious in men.
The researchers explain that, as shown by their investigation, women who simply sit around in their spare time are more vulnerable to myeloma, breast and ovarian cancers. At least for now, the team cannot say why men appear to be safe from developing cancer as a result of sitting too much.
“Longer leisure-time spent sitting was associated with a higher risk of total cancer risk in women, and specifically with multiple myeloma, breast and ovarian cancers, but sitting time was not associated with cancer risk in men,” the scientists write in the report detailing their work.