(Another) Reason to Lift Weights

Weight training cures cancer!

Well, not quite.  But new data from a couple of studies suggest that having additional muscle mass improves cancer survival rates.  According to the New York Times, in a study comparing treatment outcomes of 250 obese cancer patients,

obese patients with...lower levels of lean muscle mass lived an average of 10 months less than patients with more muscle mass, even after controlling for other variables like cancer stage and severity.

Additionally,

Other studies have shown that people who exercise have lower rates of some types of cancer.  Although the study suggests that higher levels of lean muscle mass help the body better cope with cancer, it's not clear whether lifting weights prior to or after a diagnosis would improve a patient's odds for surviving the disease.  

In other words, it's not clear whether pumping iron after a cancer diagnosis will improve your chances of recovery, or whether you have to be pre-cancerously buff, like, say, athlete/cancer survivors Alwyn Cosgrove or Lance Armstrong, in order to reap the cancer-fighting benefits of the extra contractile tissue.  

There's no indication, or even speculation, as to the mechanism at work here, but the study results are further evidence that additional muscle mass does more than help nubile youths turn heads at the beach.  

Playing armchair oncolo-psychologist for a moment, I'd wager that people who exercise (and have more muscle mass) feel better about themselves, more positive, and more in control of their environment than those who don't (Armstrong and Cosgrove are certainly bastions of the power-of-positive-thinking mentality) and that these attitudes may help beef up the immune system against cancer cells.  

Going out on another limb, I'd also suggest that muscular health might be a decent indicator of overall robustness.  If you've got extra muscle mass, you're not starving; your metabolism is cranking along fairly well; you're not sick enough that your body considers your muscle mass an unnecessary burden.  So maybe those more muscular folks who live longer with cancer or fight off some strains of the disease more effectively are simply healthier in some yet-to-be-quantified way.  

Or maybe muscular people simply have an easier time enduring the ravages of  chemotherapy, which can cause muscle-wasting.  Whatever physiological quirk is at work here, it's yet another reason to lift weights.  Now why isn't everyone--seriously, everyone--doing it?