Study: Coffee, Exercise Recipe For Skin Cancer Prevention?

Two of the most common ways to get your heart pumping are caffeine and exercise. But that’s not all they can do—according to a recent study, the combination of the two also may prevent skin cancer by killing cells damaged by the sun’s ultraviolet-B (UVB) radiation.

Published in the July 31 edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers found that the coffee-exercise combination dramatically altered apoptosis—the programmed death of pre-cancerous cells—in hairless laboratory mice that did and did not follow the regime.

The Rutgers University research team separated the mice into four groups: a group that drank caffeinated water (the human equivalent of one to two cups of coffee a day), a group that exercised on a running wheel, a group that had caffeine as well as exercised and a control group that had no caffeine or exercise.

They then compared the UVB radiation effects between the groups, finding that the caffeine-only mice showed a 95-percent increase in UVB-induced apoptosis, the exercise-only mice showed a 120-percent increase and the caffeine/exercise group showed a nearly 400 percent increase.

"The differences between the groups in the formation of UVB-induced apoptotic cells—those cells derailed from the track leading to skin cancer—were quite dramatic," says Allan Conney, one of the study's authors.

He adds that the promising results were most likely due to some kind of synergy, which is still somewhat of a mystery.

“Until this synergy is better understood, is precludes taking the research to the next level of human trials,” Conney says. “But with the stronger levels of UVC radiation evident today and an upward trend in the incidence of skin cancer among Americans, there is a premium on finding novel ways to protect our bodies from sun damage.”

Source: Yahoo