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  The benefits of regular exercise in maintaining health and wellbeing are well known, and recent research has pointed to the role it can play in preventing or even combating cancer. The new study conducted by researchers at the Australian National University (ANU) sought to dive a little deeper into this, and if exercise could prevent liver cancer in those already at high risk.

“We know exercise helps reduce rates of some cancers already but we wanted to find out if exercise would reduce liver cancer rates when there is a high risk of developing it,” says ANU’s Professor Farrell. “For example, if you have had or have hepatitis C, cirrhosis and you're a type 2 diabetic you have really a very high rate of liver cancer.”

Specifically, the team studied how fatty liver disease linked to obesity and type 2 diabetes can act as a precursor to liver cancer, and how exercise could break this chain of negative health outcomes. Mice were engineered to over-eat in order to develop obesity and type 2 diabetes, with the rodents then injected with cancer-causing agents early in life.

    One of the resources that is in critically short supply for treating COVID-19 patients in need of respiratory support is ventilators. They help to support breathing in people whose lungs have been heavily affected by the virus, but these machines face a number of problems.

    The most obvious difficulty is that ventilators are in short supply across the world as health authorities scramble to secure enough to meet the current and estimated demand as the pandemic spreads. They are also complex, expensive, require monitoring by trained personnel, and are dangerous to use on even healthy people because they require the patient to be intubated and sedated, and sometimes even paralyzed.