London: Do you sit for long hours binging on your favourite TV show? Read on. Having a standing desk at workplace and home, while maintaining a healthy lifestyle, can reduce your breast cancer risk, according to a new study.
Scientists have found a link between keeping active and a lower risk of breast cancer, saying that exercising and curbing sedentary behaviour significantly cuts the risk of women getting breast cancer.
“More widespread adoption of active lifestyles may reduce the burden from the most common cancer in women,” they said in a study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
Breast cancer is a disease in which cells in the breast grow out of control and become anything between uncomfortable to lethal.
The study looked at data from 130,957 women of European ancestry.
Of these, 69,838 had tumours that had begun to spread and 6,667 had cancer that had not yet done so and they were compared to a control group of 54,452 women without breast cancer.
The researchers identified genes linked to a lack of exercise and sedentary behaviour over a lifetime. It helped them filter out lifestyle factors that may have skewed previous studies hence revealing the link between them.
Though the study did not specifically mention standing desks, results showed people with genetic variants linked to an active lifestyle were less likely to develop all breast cancer types by 40 per cent.
People who had genes indicating they sat down for longer periods had a 104 per cent higher risk of triple negative breast cancer- the hardest to treat form of the disease.
The findings were consistent across hormone-negative tumour types, which tend to grow faster than breast cancers with oestrogen or progesterone receptors. It also provides ‘strong evidence’ that more overall physical activity and less sitting time are likely to reduce breast cancer risk.
–IANS