Always try to grab a cup of hot coffee after exercise, for a new study says that caffeine and workouts work together in staving off skin cancer.
Researchers at Rutgers Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy in New Jersey have found that the combination reduced the number of skin tumours in cancer-prone mice by 62%. Tumours also shrank by 85% in treated animals.
Lead author Dr Yao-Ping Lu said: “We found that this combination treatment can decrease sunlight-caused skin cancer formation in a mouse model. I believe we may extrapolate these findings to humans and anticipate that we would benefit from these combination treatments as well.”
In their study on mice, the laboratory rodents exercised on a running wheel after being given a dose of caffeine.
Mice treated with caffeine alone had 27% fewer tumours than untreated mice and their cancers were 61% smaller. In exercise-only mice, tumour activity decreased by 35% and tumour volume by 70%.
Dr Lu believes the common link is inflammation, which dropped as much as 92% in mice given the combination treatment.
E-Paper
