Association of Regular and Weekend Warrior Physical Activity Patterns with Gynecologic Cancer Risk: A Cross-Sectional...

The impact of different physical activity (PA) patterns, including the less-studied "weekend warrior" pattern, on gynecologic cancer risk remains unclear. This study aimed to examine the associations of regular and "weekend warrior" PA patterns with the risk of cervical cancer (CC), ovarian cancer (OC), and uterine cancer (UC).

A total of 13,675 women from the 2007-2018 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) cycles were included in this cross-sectional analysis. Weighted multivariable logistic regression models were applied to assess associations between PA patterns and the prevalence of gynecologic cancers. Subgroup analyses stratified by PA patterns and cancer subtypes were performed to explore potential interactions. In addition, restricted cubic spline (RCS) regression was used to examine possible nonlinear relationships between PA patterns and gynecologic cancer risk.

Among the 13,675 participants, 331 women self-reported a gynecologic cancer diagnosis, including 172 cases of CC, 58 cases of OC, and 101 cases of UC. In fully adjusted models, regular PA was significantly associated with a lower prevalence of gynecologic cancers (OR = 0.635, 95% CI: 0.448-0.901; p = 0.012), whereas the weekend warrior pattern PA showed a non-significant association with cancer risk (OR = 0.544, 95% CI: 0.162-1.824, p = 0.32). RCS analysis demonstrated a significant nonlinear association between PA patterns and gynecologic cancer risk (p for nonlinearity < 0.001). Subgroup analyses further identified a significant interaction with race/ethnicity (p for interaction = 0.038).

Our findings suggest that regular PA may be inversely associated with the risk of gynecologic cancers. Although the weekend warrior PA pattern did not show a statistically significant association, the wide confidence interval indicates limited statistical power, and the true effect cannot be reliably estimated. These results highlight the potential importance of consistent PA for cancer prevention, while emphasizing the need for larger studies to clarify the impact of weekend warrior PA patterns.