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Exercise May Reduce Breast Cancer Risk

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Brief Description:
In order to reduce the risk of breast cancer, you might want to hit the gym.

Transcript:
Akinso: In order to reduce the risk of breast cancer, you might want to hit the gym. Numerous studies suggest that people who exercise are less likely to get breast cancer. That's why the National Cancer Institute is conducting a study to see the effect that exercise has on inactive women who are at risk of getting the disease. Dr. Jennifer Eng-Wong, a NCI medical oncologist, discussed the design of the study.

Eng-Wong: What we're doing here is looking at physical activity as potentially a way to modulate one's risk for breast cancer. And we're looking at women between the ages of 18 and 75 who don't regularly exercise and enrolling them on to one of two exercise regimes. One is walking with a pedometer and trying to get up to a goal of 5 miles a day, and the other is stretching exercises. Both of these interventions last for about 12 weeks and we're interested in looking at can women actually do the intervention, and then we're looking at a number of secondary markers like estrogen levels, hormone levels that are implicated with the risk for breast cancer.

Akinso: Dr. Eng-Wong said the study is different from previous studies in that it asks volunteers to perform the exercise on their own and work it into their daily lives.

Eng-Wong: I think the significance of the study is can we get sedentary women at increased risk for breast cancer to increase their physical activity. That's really the primary goal. And then, following that, really trying to get a sense of the mechanism of how exercise might decrease the risk for breast cancer. There are a lot of studies of the population that show that women who regularly exercise already have a decreased risk for breast cancer but we don't really understand how that occurs. And that's one of our goals of this study; is to start understanding how that might occur.

Akinso: The trial is already open and is currently gathering volunteers. If you are interested in becoming a volunteer or for more information, you can contact Dr. Eng-Wong at (301)-496-5320. This is Wally Akinso at the National Institutes of Health Bethesda Maryland.

This page was last reviewed on May 5, 2006 .

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