Exercise Can Lower Risk for Some Types of Cancer: Study

A large new study confirms that exercise lowers the risk of many different types of cancer, and it goes a step further: It shows just how much the reduction in risk is.

People who exercised the most had a 42 percent lower risk of esophageal cancer and a 27 percent lower risk of liver cancer over 11 years than people who exercised the least, the study of 1.4 million people showed, NBC News reported.

The team at the National Cancer Institute looked at dozens of cancer studies in the U.S. and Europe, and threw all their findings together into a single analysis. They compared the people who exercised more than 90 percent of everyone else in the study to those who exercised the very least.

"A higher level of leisure-time physical activity was associated with a 7 percent lower risk of total cancer," they wrote in their report, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association's JAMA Internal Medicine.

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