Exercise in Futility

There are fundamental aspects of life that are shrouded in mystery. For example, every sentient being needs to sleep, but ask any researcher or scientist and they won’t be able to tell you why we need to sleep. Most of us also know that exercise diminishes the risk of cancer…but again, no one really knows why that is.

Put these ill-defined findings together and you get another tenebrous discovery: the risk of getting cancer is heightened in women when they get inadequate amounts of sleep, even if they exercise regularly.

Researchers from the National Cancer Institute discovered this after conducting a 10-year study that involved nearly 6,000 women ranging in age from 18 to 65. The goal of the study was to see what, if any, ties there were between physical activity energy expenditure (otherwise known as PAEE), sleep duration and diagnoses of any and all cancers, but with particular attention paid to breast and colon cancers (the first and third leading cancer diagnoses among women, respectively). Determining how long and to what extent the women slept and exercised was gathered via survey data, which the women catalogued regularly throughout the 10-year study beginning way back in 1998.

Upon the study’s completion, the researchers looked at the data to see if any of the women contracted forms of cancer during the study (researchers made sure that none of the women were diagnosed with cancer at the study’s outset). They found that of the 6,000 women, approximately 10 percent contracted some form of cancer, nearly 200 of them being breast. When they analyzed the women’s PAEE, exercise was something of a catalyst in women avoiding cancer – just as they expected. Those in the upper quadrant of physical activity energy expenditure were far less likely to be diagnosed with cancer – again, not an unexpected finding.

That’s just when things went a wee bit screwy.

I say this because up to now, the benefits of exercise seem unmatched – in other words, there’s virtually nothing that can diminish its effectiveness in improving health. But it may have met its match with sleep. That’s because researchers discovered that when women slept less than seven hours a night, they were more likely to be diagnosed with cancer, even if they were high in the PAEE quotient.

The study’s lead researcher James McClain, Ph.D isn’t sure why this is the case, which is why more studies are in the offing. It likely has something to do with the impact sleep has on the hormones released in the body and its role in regulating the body’s metabolic rate, part of the reason why McClain and others assessed the sleep/exercise link in the first place.

Their findings were presented at the 7th Annual International Conference on Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research for the American Association for Cancer Research.

This study further solidifies the importance of sleep. So many people think they can operate on six hours of sleep and get by without a problem. That may be true in some respects, but if one of the prime reasons for exercise is to reduce cancer risk, hours spent in the gym is an exercise in futility when sleep is not part of the equation.