Walking May Lower Breast Cancer Risk

Summary

Researchers with the Epidemiology Research Program at the American Cancer Society began an experiment when 73,600 postmenopausal women enrolled in the early 1990s. For two decades, they would answer questionnaires every two years. One question was how the women how or weather they exercised. Most of the women walked on a regular basis but 9 percent said that they didn't exercise at all. Over the course of the study, 4760 of the women devolved breast cancer. When they compared the questionnaires to the medical records, women who walked around 7 hours a week had 14 percent less risk than the the women who never exercised. Walking can reduce the chance of risk to breast cancer even if the patients are overweight. 

Relevance

This article is relevant to our curriculum because we studied tumors and cancer. We learned that cancer cells disrupt the cell cycle and divide uncontrollably. This is what makes them so hard to remove. One method to remove these cancer cells is to remove them by surgery but with surgery, it is difficult to remove it completely. Another method is to expose the cells to a high energy radiation, that disrupts the cell cycle. This article suggests that instead of removing the cancer cells, that people avoid the disease all together by walking.

Link
See the article here: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/09/how-walking-may-lower-breast-cancer-risk/?_r=0

Author: Gretchen Reynolds
Date of Publication: October 9th, 2013