It's well established that exercise can provide positive health benefits. But a new study has found that exercise can provide benefits in ways that weren't previously acknowledged. Rutgers University cancer researcher Allan Conney and his colleagues have found that exercise can in fact help protect against skin cancer. Appearing in the journal Carcinogenesis, Conney's study found that mice exposed to ultraviolet light (UV) - and with continual access to running wheels - took longer to develop skin tumors and developed fewer and smaller tumors than a group of similarly exposed mice that didn't have access to workout equipment.
Conney said this was the first time the relationship between skin carcinogenesis and exercise has been studied in the laboratory. The study found that the mice with access to running wheels had approximately 32 percent fewer tumors than animals without running wheels. And tumor size per mouse in the non-exercising group was on average more than three times greater than for the group with the running wheels.
As might be expected, the exercising mice had less body fat than their more sedentary cousins. "This relationship between body fat and tumors may also play an important role in carcinogenesis and warrants further investigation, particularly with obesity on the increase in the Western world," said Conney.
The researchers hypothesize that exercise enhances UV-induced apoptosis (programmed cell death) both in the skin - a normal, protective process that removes sun-damaged cells - and in UV-induced tumors. "While UV is triggering the development of tumors, exercise is counteracting the effect by stimulating the death of the developing cancer cells," explained Conney. He added that further studies would be needed to establish whether exercise had the same effect on sunlight-induced skin cancer in humans.
Source: Rutgers University
