by Playfuls Staff |
14th September 2006
Aerobic exercise may play a major role in reducing the risk of colon cancer and colon polyps in men, a Seattle study says.
"Vigorous exercise was helpful for men of [more] any size, as long as they worked out nearly every day," said researcher Dr. Anne McTiernan of Seattle's Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.
McTiernan's team studied 102 men and 100 women aged 40-75 years who had had a colonoscopy within the past three years, WebMD reports from the September edition of the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention.
Half the group was told to exercise; the other half was not. Neither was asked to change their diets.
The men who exercised showed substantially less cancer-cell growth than the non-exercising men after a year.
Women in the exercise group did not show any difference from their non-exercising counterparts.
"It's not a finding that we really wanted to see," McTiernan said, adding she did not know the reasons for the gender gap.
© 2006 UPI
