• Posted January 23, 2025

Fitter Folks Have Better Odds Against Cancer

Pumping iron and hitting the treadmill can improve your odds against cancer, a new evidence review says.

People with more muscle strength and better cardio fitness are less likely to die from cancer, researchers reported recently in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

This survival benefit extends even to people with advanced-stage cancers, results show.

“Muscle strength and cardiorespiratory fitness were significant predictors of all-cause mortality, especially in patients with advanced cancer,” concluded the research team led by Robert Newton, a professor of exercise medicine at Edith Cowan University in Australia.

The results indicate that hitting the gym might deserve to be part of a person's cancer treatment, researchers added.

“Implementing tailored exercise prescriptions to enhance these physical fitness components throughout the cancer continuum may contribute to reducing cancer-related mortality,” the researchers wrote.

Previous studies have linked better physical fitness to an overall lower risk of early death, as well as a lower risk of death by heart or lung disease, researchers said in background notes.

But this is the first time a review has attempted to see whether fitness can ward off death from cancer, researchers said. Previous research has mainly focused on whether fitness can prevent cancer from occurring.

For their review, researchers pooled data from 42 previous studies involving nearly 47,000 patients with various stages and types of cancer.

Results showed that cancer patients with better muscle strength and fitness were 31% to 46% less likely to die prematurely from any cause.

What’s more, their risk of death fell as their muscle strength and fitness increased, researchers said.

Each unit increase in muscle strength lowered cancer patients' risk of death from any cause by another 11%.

Likewise, each unit increase in fitness level lowered risk of cancer-related death by 18%.

Benefits also extended to patients with advanced cancer, whose risk of early death was 8% to 46% lower if their muscle strength and cardio fitness were high.

Strength and fitness specifically lowered risk of death 19% to 41% among people with lung or GI cancers, researchers found. 

“Our findings highlight that muscle strength could potentially be used in clinical practice to determine mortality risk in cancer patients in advanced stages and, therefore, muscle strengthening activities could be employed to increase life expectancy,” researchers wrote.

More information

The National Cancer Institute has more on physical activity and cancer.

SOURCE: British Journal of Sports Medicine, news release, Jan. 21, 2025