Get Active, Beat Lymphoma?

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Slowly but surely, more and more African Americans are turning a new leaf when it comes to working out and eating healthy. Fitness rock stars like TrapYogaBae and KTX Fitness have set the pathway that not only caters to getting healthy but having fun while doing it. Luckily in this new wave of fitness hype, researchers have found that physical activity appears to help people with lymphoma survive their disease.

That finding comes from a new study by Mayo Clinic researchers of nearly 4,100 people with lymphoma, cancer that starts in the white blood cells that normally help fight infection.

“As physicians, we recommend physical activity for all cancer survivors to improve the overall quality of life, but we did not know if the physical activity would have an impact on survival in lymphoma patients,” said study author Dr. Priyanka Pophali, a hematologist at Mayo Clinic.

“Our findings show that physical activity can have a positive impact on survival in lymphoma patients,” she said in a Mayo news release.

Through periodic questionnaires, the researchers tracked the participants’ physical activity levels from before their cancer diagnoses until three years afterward.

People whose physical activity was greater than normal before diagnosis were less likely to have died from lymphoma, or from any other cause, than were those who’d