Cardiorespiratory Fitness as a Predictor of Cancer Mortality Among Men With Pre-Diabetes and Diabetes

Abstract

OBJECTIVE—The purpose of this article was to examine the risk of cancer mortality across levels of fitness and to examine the fitness-mortality relation for site-specific cancers in men with pre-diabetes and diabetes. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS—We examined the fitness-mortality relation for all-cause and site-specific cancer mortality among 18,858 men with pre-diabetes and 2,805 men with diabetes (aged 46.3 ± 9.7 years [mean ± SD]) from the Aerobics Center Longitudinal Study. We identified 719 cancer deaths during 354,558 person-years of risk. The duration of follow-up was 16.4 ± 7.8 years (range <1–30.0 years). RESULTS—In men with pre-diabetes, moderate (hazard ratio 0.71 [95% CI 0.57–0.88]) and high fitness (0.76 [0.60–0.96]) were associated with lower risks of cancer mortality compared with the low-fit group in a model adjusted for age, examination year, smoking, alcohol use, fasting glucose concentration, previous cancer, and BMI. Similarly, for individuals with diabetes, moderate (0.53 [0.35–0.82]) and high fitness (0.44 [0.26–0.73]) were associated with lower risks of cancer mortality compared with the low-fit group. Among all men, being fit was associated with a lower risk of mortality from gastrointestinal (0.55 [0.39–0.77]), colorectal (0.53 [0.30–0.96]), liver (0.22 [0.07–0.71]), and lung cancer (0.43 [0.30–0.60]). CONCLUSIONS—In men with pre-diabetes and diabetes, higher levels of cardiorespiratory fitness were associated with lower risk of cancer mortality, particularly as a result of cancers of the gastrointestinal tract, compared with those who had low levels of fitness.