Running might beat walking for breast cancer survivors

Exercise has long been credited with both reducing the risk of breast cancer and surviving the disease.

Now a new study suggests, but doesn’t prove, that breast cancer survivors who run have an even greater survival edge than those who walk.

“Exercise per se lowers the risk of breast cancer death, but, more importantly, we found a difference between walkers and runners,” said study author Paul Williams, a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.

“We see these huge reductions [in breast cancer deaths] in women who run -much greater than those who walk,” Williams said. “[Even so], we don’t see this as negating the benefit of walking.”

But running appears to confer more protection than walking in reducing the risk of dying from breast cancer, he said.

The study was published online recently in the International Journal of Cancer.

Williams compared two groups from his long-running National Runners’ and Walker’s Health Study. He followed nearly 300 runners and more than 700 walkers, all of whom had been diagnosed with breast cancer. During the nine-year study, 33 of the walkers and 13 of the runners died from breast cancer.

Williams took into account other factors that might influence survival, such as age, family history, race and menopausal status.

When he looked at all the women as a single group, he found about a 25 percent reduction in death from breast cancer during the follow-up period for every mile of brisk walking or two-thirds of a mile of running.

When he looked at just the runners, however, he found that the same amount of running reduced the risk of death by more than 40 percent. The runners who averaged more than two and a quarter miles per day had a 95 percent lower risk of death from breast cancer during the follow-up period.