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Building muscle mass and strength protects against cancer. That conclusion is reached by researchers from the University of South Carolina in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention. The Americans followed more than ten thousand men examined in the 1980s at the Cooper Clinic in Dallas until 2003. If men could bench-press and leg-press with slightly heavier weights, they were less likely to die of cancer.

Fitness protects against cancer. The very best thing is when you are fit and strong. If you are not fit, the protective effect of muscular strength is not as great.

The researchers also looked at types of cancer in their study. Body strength protected against all types except prostate cancer. The strongest was the effect on cancers in the digestive tract.

The researchers suspected that muscle strength protected against all types of cancer.

The researchers suspect that muscle mass protects because muscle cells drain anabolic hormones from the body. The same hormones that cause muscle growth, IGF-1 foremost, also stimulate the growth of tumours.

The researchers are clear about the implications of their study. "It is biologically plausible to reduce cancer mortality death rates among men by promoting regular resistance training involving the major muscle groups of the upper and lower extremities at least 2 days per week," they write. "Resistance and aerobic exercise should complement each other."

If you ever have to undergo major surgery, your muscle mass will help determine whether you get complications - and whether you survive the procedure. This is according to the thesis of physician-researcher and surgeon-in-training Jeroen van Vugt, who received his PhD from Erasmus MC on 20 December 2017.

Van Vugt followed a group of 816 colon cancer patients in whom doctors had removed the affected parts. The average age of the study participants was about 70 years.

The study participants with relatively high muscle density had higher survival rates than the study participants with low muscle density.

In yet another sub-study, Van Vugt collected previously published studies on the relationship between muscle mass on the one hand and survival rates of people who had undergone liver transplants on the other.

And yes: in those studies, too, relatively high muscle mass increased the chances of survival.

If you do heavy physical work or train with weights, you not only make your body more muscular and stronger, but also make it last longer. Muscle mass extends lifespan, write researchers from the David Geffen School of Medicine in the American Journal of Medicine.

Srikanthan followed participants from 1989-1994 to 2004. When the study began, the men were over 55, and the women over 65. Srikanthan kept track of who among the study participants died in the 10-16 year period.

Participants with a lot of muscle were 20 per cent less likely to die than those with little muscle.

Exactly how muscle mass increases the chances of a long life, Srikanthan does not know. Maybe muscle mass protects against high glucose levels, maybe muscle mass helps lower the amount of dangerous fat in the body, or maybe muscles produce protective substances.

"Get up and start moving," says the researcher in an interview with Christopher Intagliata of Scientific American. "Focus on trying to maintain the maximum amount of resistance training that you can, and stop worrying so much about dropping calories."

After the age of 30, your brain starts to shrink. Very, very slowly at first, but as the years climb, the rate increases. So if you live long enough, dementia is inevitable. You would think. Psychologists at the University of Pittsburgh discovered that you can reverse the deterioration of your brain if you run for 40 min three times a week.

A crucial organ in the brain is the hippocampus. The better that organ functions, the better your memory works. By age 60, the hippocampus shrinks by 1-2 per cent every year. That sounds worrying - and it is - but neurologists consider it an inevitable consequence of ageing.

The US psychologists conducted an experiment with 120 healthy men and women aged 66 on average. Half of the subjects did stretching exercises three times a week for a year, while the other half ran for 40 min three times a week. The intensity was 60-75 per cent of their maximum oxygen uptake. In the process, you could still carry on a conversation just barely or not at all.

During the experiment, the volume of the hippocampus of the subjects who did stretching exercises decreased. In the subjects who ran, the opposite happened. In them, the volume of the hippocampus increased by 2 per cent.

The researchers used maximum oxygen intake to determine how much fitter the subjects had become, and found that as the subjects became fitter, their hippocampus grew more.

The researchers finally determined the subjects' memory function with tests. The more the hippocampus grew, the more the subjects' scores improved.