Sleep, physical activity, and sedentary behaviors in relation to overall cancer and site-specific cancer risk: A prospective cohort study

Abstract

Large prospective studies are required to better elucidate the associations of physical activity, sedentary behaviors (SBs), and sleep with overall cancer and site-specific cancer risk, accounting for the interactions with genetic predisposition. The study included 360,271 individuals in UK Biobank. After a median follow-up of 12.52 years, we found higher total physical activity (TPA) level and higher sleep scores were related to reduced risk of cancer while higher SB level showed a positive association with cancer. Compared with high TPA-healthy sleep group and low SB-healthy sleep group, low TPA-poor sleep group and high SB-poor sleep group had the highest risk for overall cancer, breast cancer, and lung cancer. Adherence to a more active exercise pattern was associated with a lower risk of cancer irrespective of genetic risk. Our study suggests that improving the quality of sleep and developing physical activity habits might yield benefits in mitigating the cancer risk.

Keywords: Cancer; Health sciences.

Graphical abstract

Figure 1

Risk of incident overall cancer by joint categorization for genetic risk and healthy sleep score, physical activity, and sedentary behavior 1. (A) Sleep score, P interaction = 0.782; (B) total physical activity, P interaction = 0.589; (C) sedentary behavior, P interaction = 0.699. 2. Adjusted by age at recruitment age (continuous), sex (male/female), ethnicity (white/non-white/unknown), education (college/high school and below/unknown), TDI (continuous), smoke (pack-year), alcohol intake (never/former/current), height (continuous), body mass index (continuous), use of NSAIDs (yes/no), family history of cancer (yes/no), diabetes (yes/no), hypertension (yes/no), CVD (yes/no). Sleep score, total physical activity and sedentary behavior mutually adjusted. 3. Participants were then categorized into low genetic risk (Q1), intermediate genetic risk (Q2-4), and high genetic risk (Q5) according to overall cancer genetic risk score. 4. Sleep scores were categorized into: poor, T1; intermediate, T2; healthy, T3. Total physical activity was grouped as low level <971.000 MET min/week; medium level 971.000–2600.565 MET min/week; high level >2600.565 MET min/week. Sedentary behavior was grouped as low level <3 h/day; medium level 3–4 h/day; high level >4 h/day.