By Staff Reports
(Hawaii)– From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I’m Ira Dreyfuss with HHS HealthBeat.
Living healthy seems to have a heightened importance for adult survivors of childhood cancer. At St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, researcher Kirsten Ness saw this in data on about 1,600 survivors.
Ness says survivors who did not have a healthy lifestyle, including good diet and physical activity, were more than twice as likely to develop metabolic syndrome. That’s a group of conditions including high blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol, and belly fat, which raises the risk of diabetes and heart disease.
Ness says they can do something about metabolic syndrome:
“Lifestyle plays a factor. And if they adopt a healthy lifestyle, they’ll decrease their overall risk.”
The study in the journal Cancer was supported by the National Institutes of Health.
Learn more at healthfinder.gov.
HHS HealthBeat is a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I’m Ira Dreyfuss.