CME report – Exercise Won’t Keep MS at Bay for Women - Multiple Sclerosis (MS) Information, and resources

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Analysis of Nurses Health Study cohorts suggests no protective effect

by Kate Kneisel Contributing Writer, MedPage Today

09.30.2016Physical activity during early life and adulthood does not appear to reduce a woman’s risk of developing multiple sclerosis (MS), researchers found.In two prospective cohorts of more than 193,000 women who participated in the Nurses’ Health Study and the Nurses’ Health Study II, those in the highest quartile of baseline physical activity had a 27% reduced rate of MS compared with those in the lowest quartile — but this only trended toward significance (P=0.08), according to Kassandra Munger, ScD, of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and colleagues.

Additionally, the trend was not observed in a 6-year lagged analysis, they reported online inNeurology.

“Overall, there was no consistent association of exercise at any age and MS,” Munger said in a statement. “Exercise has been shown to be beneficial to people with the disease, but it seems unlikely that exercise protects against the risk of developing MS.”

Exercise has been shown to benefit patients with mild or moderate MS, and some work has suggested it may even slow the progression of the disease, but little research has focused on the association between physical activity and risk of developing MS, the researchers said.

So they assessed women in the the Nurses Health Study cohorts who were followed for up to 20 years and who had completed regular questionnaires about current and past physical activity as teens and young adults. During the course of those studies, a total of 341 women developed MS.

Continued

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