Tag Archives: AICR Research Conference

The Research Conference That Almost Was

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It was with heavy hearts that we made the decision to cancel this year’s AICR Research Conference on Food, Nutrition, Physical Activity and Cancer. The lingering effect of Hurricane Sandy on air travel and communications across the East Coast left us no choice.

We feel a particularly poignant sense of loss, as this year represents an important milestone for AICR. In 2012, we mark 30 years of supporting innovative cancer research and delivering to the public the evidence-based message that many cancers can be prevented. We would have greatly enjoyed observing this achievement with the researchers, health professionals, policy makers and journalists who have been with us from the beginning — as well as welcoming many new colleagues who are making their own contributions to the field.

Our research conference is a yearly highlight for the entire AICR staff. We are tremendously proud to bring together the world’s leading figures in the study of diet, physical activity and cancer risk, and we delight in offering them a chance to share their findings and discuss bold new research directions. Continue reading →

Inactivity and Cancer: A Closer Look

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As we highlighted yesterday, the British medical journal The Lancet has released a series of papers on inactivity and its link to non-communicable diseases (NCDs). The authors of one paper used statistical methods to derive what they consider very conservative estimates of how many of these diseases could be prevented globally if everyone became more active (defined as meeting the WHO guidelines on physical activity, which match the Federal Government’s Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans).

The non-communicable diseases in question? Coronary heart disease, Type 2 diabetes … and cancer. Specifically, breast and colon cancers.

All of us at AICR, who have been working to raise awareness about the link between physical activity and lower cancer risk for many years, welcome these papers. It’s gratifying, given the strong evidence presented in the AICR/WCRF expert report and that continues to mount in the AICR/WCRF Continuous Update Project (CUP), to finally see cancer taking its place alongside heart disease and diabetes on such a high-profile list.

Last year, at the AICR Annual Research Conference, we released estimates of the number of US cancers linked to inactivity. There are several ways to calculate such estimates, and the Lancet team used different statistical methods to arrive at their numbers, but the results are strikingly similar, and make it clearer than ever that being inactive has a major impact on cancer, on par with obesity and smoking. Continue reading →

Don’t Just Sit There: The Case Against Sitting Gets (Even) Stronger

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A new study adds to the mounting evidence that the kind of prolonged sitting most of us do every day is killing us. That’s the bad news.

The good news — which this new study in the journal Diabetes Care also demonstrates — is that simply breaking up those long hours of sitting with a little walking can help.

Last November, at AICR’s Research Conference, we highlighted exciting research that measured several common indicators of cancer risk (like insulin resistance, waist circumference and inflammation) and found that adding even brief activity breaks decreased these indicators in ways linked to lower cancer risk. Continue reading →