Exercise and Healthy Waist Measurement Boost Bowel Cancer Survival Rates 

Bowel cancer patients who exercise regularly before diagnosis are much more likely to still be alive five years later than couch potatoes, an Australian study has found.

Medical oncologist Andrew Haydon, of Melbourne's Alfred Hospital, and colleagues found bowel cancer sufferers who exercised routinely had a 14 per cent survival advantage.

The chance of dying for regular exercisers was halved if they had stage two or three tumours - moderately advanced cancer which had not spread to other parts of the body, Dr Haydon said.

"That's a huge reduction," he explained in an interview.

"We don't see reductions anywhere near that big with chemotherapy. We were surprised by the magnitude of the benefit."

The researchers found people whose cancer had already spread to other parts of the body showed no survival benefit from pre-diagnosis exercise.

They studied 526 patients with bowel cancer, who were among more than 40,000 Australian volunteers recruited between 1990 and 1994 for the Melbourne Collaborative Cohort Study.

Their findings were published this week in the journal, Gut.

Dr Haydon said the Australian results were in line with findings from a recent study which found similar benefits of exercise in breast cancer patients and yet-to-be-published American bowel cancer research.

"We're very confident that this is a true effect," he said.

Scientists have known for some time that physical activity reduces the incidence of bowel cancer, but Dr Haydon said the Melbourne study was the first published data showing exercise and percentage of body fat impacted on the survival of people with cancer.

Dr Haydon said the main limitation of the research was that study participants were only questioned about their exercise habits when they were recruited, and therefore before they had developed bowel cancer.

"We don't know whether people continued to exercise and we don't know whether exercise after diagnosis has this same beneficial effect because we haven't assessed post-diagnosis exercise," he said.

The research found patients who had a healthy waist measurement - defined by the World Health Organisation as 80cm for women and 94cm for men - had a 35 per cent greater survival rate than those with excessive body fat.