Lifetime vigorous physical activity may be beneficial in lowering risk for non-Hodgkin lymphoma

the Oncology Nurse Advisor take:

Level of physical activity over a lifetime can impact risk for non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL).

In a study from the Department of Cancer Control Research at the British Columbia (BC) Cancer Agency and the School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia in Canada, researchers investigated the impact of vigorous physical activity on risk of NHL.

Risk of some cancers, such as breast and colon cancers, is lower in people who are physically active, and these researchers sought evidence of a similar association for NHL.

The study was conducted using data from a case-control study that recruited 820 patients with NHL of various ages from the BC Cancer Registry and 848 randomly selected controls matched for age, gender, and residential location from the Client Registry of the British Columbia Ministry of Health.

Study participants in the second and higher quartiles of vigorously intense physical activity performance had lower risk for NHL compared with those in the first quartile of vigorously intense physical activity performance.

Although research to date is not sufficient to confidently state that vigorous physical activity can reduce risk for NHL, these findings indicate that vigorous physical activity is beneficial in terms of risk for this disease.

That different types of NHL have different risk factors is known, so the researchers are planning to investigate whether physical activity influences the risk for different types of NHL in different ways.