A recent study suggests that people who donate blood regularly may have genetic changes in their blood that could in fact reduce the risk of developing cancer. It is conducted by the researchers at the Francis Crick Institute, and the study has now provided new insights into how and why blood cancers develop. The study is published in the journal Blood and was conducted by the scientists from Heidelberg and the German Red Cross blood donation center. There is yet a need for further research to confirm these findings.

What Did The Study Find?

The researchers examined the blood of two groups of healthy male donors in their 60s:

• One group had donated blood three times a year for 40 years.
• The other group had donated only about five times in total.

The goal was to analyze genetic mutations in their blood and assess whether frequent donation had any impact on their genetic makeup.

How Can Blood Donation Affect Stem Cells?

As and when people age, their blood and other cells naturally develop mutations and some of them can also increase the risk of cancer. When anyone donates blood, his or her body compensates by producing new blood cells, which can influence the genetic diversity of stem cells in the bone marrow. The study also found that both groups had a similar number of mutations. For instance the frequent donors had 217 mutations, while the irregular donors had 212 mutations.

However, the nature of these mutations differed. In the frequent donors, 50% of the mutations were of a type not associated with a high risk of blood cancers, compared to only 30% in the irregular donors.

Further laboratory analysis showed that these specific mutations behaved differently from those linked to leukemia, a type of blood cancer. When human blood stem cells with these mutations were injected into mice, they were found to be highly effective at producing red blood cells, which is considered a positive outcome.

Dr. Hector Huerga Encabo, one of the study authors, emphasized that these mutations do not indicate an increased risk of leukemia. The findings suggest that regular blood donation may influence how stem cells evolve, but whether this translates into a lower cancer risk remains uncertain.

Read More: Who Can Donate Blood To Whom?

Limitations

One notable disadvantage is the "healthy-donor effect"—because blood donors are often healthier than the general population, their lower cancer risk could be unrelated to blood donation.

Dominique Bonnet, senior researcher and head of a stem-cell laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute, stressed the need for larger studies with female volunteers to confirm the findings.

Despite ongoing research into potential health benefits for donors, the primary goal of blood donation remains saving lives. NHS Blood and Transplant emphasized that while the study is interesting, further research is required to draw firm conclusions. The organization also noted that blood supplies are currently critically low and encouraged eligible individuals to donate.

Also Read: How Long After a Tattoo or Piercing Can I Donate Blood?

With less time and more work, chronic fatigue has become a moniker of modern society. However, this not only reduces the quality of life but also constitutes a social issue that affects work efficiency and leads to accidents. On the surface, the cause of fatigue is often attributed to not getting enough rest, but there may be another underlying issue—the lack of proper nutrition.

The world moves at a hectic pace these days. If you feel like you're constantly running on empty, you're not alone. Many people say that they just don't have the energy they need to accomplish all they need to. Sometimes the cause of fatigue is obvious — for example, getting over the flu or falling short on sleep. Sometimes a vitamin deficiency is part of the problem. It might be worth asking your doctor to check a few vitamin levels, such as the three we've listed below.

Key Nutrient Deficiencies That Can Cause Fatigue

- Iron

Anemia occurs when there aren't enough red blood cells to meet the body's need for oxygen, or when these cells don't carry enough of an important protein called hemoglobin. Fatigue is usually the first sign of anemia. A blood test to measure the number of red blood cells and the amount of hemoglobin can tell if you have anemia. The first step in shoring up your body's iron supply is with iron-rich foods (such as red meat, eggs, rice, and beans) or, with your doctor's okay, over-the-counter supplements.

- Vitamin B12

Your body needs sufficient vitamin B12 in order to produce healthy red blood cells. So a deficiency in this vitamin can also cause anemia. The main sources of B12 are meat and dairy products, so many people get enough through diet alone. However, it becomes harder for the body to absorb B12 as you get older, and some illnesses (for example, inflammatory bowel disease) can also impair absorption. Many vegetarians and vegans become deficient in B12 because they don't eat meat or dairy. When B12 deficiency is diet-related, oral supplements and dietary changes to increase B12 intake usually do the trick. Other causes of B12 deficiency are usually treated with regular injections of vitamin B12.

- Vitamin D

A deficit of this vitamin can sap bone and muscle strength. This vitamin is unique in that your body can produce it when your skin is exposed to sunlight, but there also aren't many natural food sources of it. You can find it in some types of fish (such as tuna and salmon) and in fortified products such as milk, orange juice, and breakfast cereals. Supplements are another way to ensure you're getting enough vitamin D (note that the D3 form is easier to absorb than other forms of vitamin D).

What Does Research Say?

Taking this into account, a research group led by Professor Hiroaki Kanouchi at Osaka Metropolitan University's Graduate School of Human Life and Ecology focused on nutritional status and water-soluble vitamin deficiencies found in unbalanced diets. The team hypothesized that a lack of folate (B9) and vitamin B12 may be related to fatigue, and centered their research around homocysteine (Hcy), a biomarker known to increase when these deficiencies are present.

Blood concentrations of Hcy, folate, and vitamin B12 in approximately 600 healthy Japanese participants were measured. Participants' fatigue and motivation were assessed using the Chalder Fatigue Scale questionnaire and the Visual Analog Scale. The initial results showed that individuals with higher blood Hcy levels had lower levels of vitamin B12 and folate, regardless of sex.

The Link Between Homocysteine and Fatigue

The researchers then examined the relationship between homocysteine levels and fatigue separately for men and women. In their analysis, factors that may influence fatigue, such as age, sleep duration, workload, and dietary habits, were simultaneously accounted for.

The results revealed that higher Hcy levels were associated with greater physical fatigue in men, while higher levels were associated with decreased motivation in women.

(Dr Alex Mathew, Senior Consultant – Internal Medicine, Max Super Speciality Hospital, Patparganj)

A casual match still feels like exercise. For a heart that has not been conditioned to meet sudden, competitive demand, it can briefly become something closer to a stress test it never agreed to take. The risk lies less in the sport itself than in how unprepared the body is for it.

Ninety Minutes the Heart Never Trained

For Sunday mornings across recreational pitches host a familiar ritual: amateur footballers, most with desk jobs and six quiet days since their last real exertion, sprinting straight into competitive play. From the sideline, the scene reads as a picture of health, a weekly act of discipline squeezed into a busy schedule. Beneath that surface, the cardiovascular system experiences something closer to an ambush than a workout.

This is the territory of the so-called weekend warrior, an individual whose physical activity arrives in concentrated, high-intensity bursts rather than a steady weekly rhythm, with a heart and coronary arteries rarely tested anywhere near as hard as they are about to be for the next ninety minutes.

The Other Muscle That Needs Oxygen

Working skeletal muscle during competitive football consumes oxygen at a rate many times its resting baseline, since contraction and sustained movement depend on aerobic metabolism and a steady oxygen supply.

To meet that demand, the heart itself must work harder: heart rate and contractile force both rise, meaning the heart muscle, the myocardium, needs more oxygen simply to keep pumping blood to the rest of the body.

Under normal circumstances, the coronary arteries that feed the heart respond by dilating, widening to allow greater blood flow exactly when it is needed most. That system performs well when demand rises gradually. Sudden maximal exertion, the kind that defines an unplanned sprint for a loose ball, can push myocardial oxygen demand upward by as much as fivefold almost instantly, leaving far less margin for the coronary circulation to compensate, particularly if the vessels are not entirely healthy to begin with.

The Tipping Point Between Workout and Warning Sign

Roughly one in five sudden cardiac deaths overall occur during or immediately after physical exertion, underscoring exercise's specific role as a trigger rather than simply a background risk. That role intensifies when vigorous activity follows a long stretch of inactivity, which describes the typical week of a recreational footballer far more than a trained athlete's training calendar.

The sequence generally begins with sympathetic nervous system activation: a surge of stress hormones, principally adrenaline, released the moment competitive exertion begins. This catecholamine surge raises heart rate and blood pressure almost immediately, driving myocardial oxygen demand upward at the moment the heart is least prepared for it.

The same surge can act on the coronary arteries directly, provoking constriction or spasm rather than the dilation exercise normally calls for, a paradox that includes rare stress-related conditions such as Takotsubo syndrome. For someone carrying an often undiagnosed plaque burden, a narrowing in the range of 25 to 50 percent of the vessel, this combination can convert a previously silent lesion into one that becomes hemodynamically significant under load. What follows is demand ischemia: a mismatch between the oxygen the heart needs and what the coronary circulation can deliver, arising not because a vessel has abruptly blocked but because demand has outrun supply.

In some cases, this transient oxygen deprivation is severe enough to qualify as a Type 2 myocardial infarction, distinct from the more familiar plaque-rupture heart attack but no less serious.

Not Every Player on the Pitch Carries the Same Risk

Risk concentrates most heavily among adults who are otherwise sedentary, since their cardiovascular systems have had no recent opportunity to adapt to exertion, and among those carrying undiagnosed coronary artery disease that produces no symptoms until it is tested by genuine physical stress. Diabetes, hypertension, a history of smoking, obesity, and elevated cholesterol all raise the likelihood that some degree of coronary plaque exists before a single whistle blows. This is a meaningfully different population from trained athletes.

Notably, even habitually active masters-level endurance athletes can show a higher prevalence of coronary atherosclerosis than sedentary peers with similar risk profiles, though their plaques tend to be more stable, which may blunt rupture risk. The weekend warrior, by contrast, often brings unmanaged risk factors and an unconditioned cardiovascular system to the same ninety minutes.

Conditioning the Heart Before the Whistle Blows

Clinical guidance translates into a handful of concrete principles. Progressive conditioning, building tolerance gradually rather than asking an unconditioned heart to meet maximal demand in a single afternoon, is foundational, alongside regular weekly activity rather than sporadic, all-or-nothing bursts. Easing into intensity rather than launching directly into competitive sprinting gives the cardiovascular system time to adjust.

For adults with elevated risk, particularly relevant family history, multiple risk factors, or symptoms during past exertion, screening, a physical examination, a resting ECG, and, in some cases, formal exercise testing, can surface disease before it is exposed on the pitch. Equally important is recognizing warning signs that should end a match rather than be played through: chest discomfort, disproportionate breathlessness, an unexplained drop in pace, palpitations, or impaired consciousness.

With those precautions, a safe return to recreational sport remains achievable for most adults, including many with treated cardiovascular risk.

Steady Beats Sudden

None of this indicates football, or recreational sport more broadly. The danger lies not in the game itself but in asking an unconditioned cardiovascular system to absorb sudden, maximal physiological stress without preparation. The heart adapts well to demands placed on it steadily and repeatedly. It adapts far less gracefully to demands sprung on it once a week, after six days of stillness. Consistency, not occasional intensity, is what ultimately protects it.

Advances in hematology, oncology, and blood and marrow transplantation (BMT) have transformed patient outcomes over the past two decades. However, alongside these achievements lies a persistent and often underappreciated threat—Invasive Fungal Infections (IFIs).

Despite significant improvements in diagnostics and antifungal therapies, IFIs continue to contribute substantially to morbidity, mortality, prolonged hospitalization, and healthcare costs among immunocompromised patients. Fungal infections in patients with blood cancers and blood disorders are neither rare nor unpredictable. And yet they continue to be diagnosed too late, too often.

What Happens To The Immune System During Treatment?

The treatments that have transformed the outlook for leukemia, lymphoma, myeloma, and serious bone marrow disorders are genuinely remarkable. Intensive chemotherapy, bone marrow transplantation, and the newer targeted therapies have extended and saved lives in ways that were not imaginable a generation ago. But each of them does something to the immune system that creates a serious risk.

Chemotherapy depletes neutrophils, the white blood cells specifically responsible for recognizing and destroying fungal organisms. A transplant requires conditioning that leaves patients with almost no immune defenses for an extended period. Prolonged neutropenia, mucosal barrier injury, corticosteroid exposure, graft-versus-host disease, and the increasing use of targeted therapies collectively create an environment where opportunistic fungal pathogens can thrive. Some of the most effective modern therapies in hematology work by modifying immune pathways, leaving patients vulnerable to fungal disease for months after treatment ends. This window can last weeks, sometimes much longer.

The Fungi That Exploit This Window

Aspergillus is a mould found in ordinary dust and soil. In most people, it causes no harm whatsoever. In a patient with severely depleted white blood cells, it can establish a lung infection that progresses faster than most people would expect and carries a mortality rate that remains unacceptably high even with treatment. The earlier it is identified, the better the outcome. But the gap between early and late diagnosis in this context is narrow and unforgiving.

Mucormycosis is less familiar to the public but arguably more aggressive. It invades blood vessel walls directly, cutting off blood supply to surrounding tissue. Patients with blood disorders who require repeated transfusions are at particular risk because excess iron in the body accelerates their growth significantly. India has the highest burden of this infection in the world. That statistic deserves more attention than it currently receives.

Candida lives in the gut of most healthy individuals without causing any problems. When the gut lining is damaged by chemotherapy, it can cross into the bloodstream and reach the liver, spleen, and other organs, causing infections that are difficult to detect and slow to resolve.

Delayed recognition frequently results in disease progression, leading to respiratory failure, disseminated infection, and poor outcomes.

The Problem Is Underdiagnoses

None of these infections begins dramatically. The early signs are a fever that does not settle with antibiotics, a cough without an obvious cause, and breathlessness that seems proportionate to the treatment but lingers too long. In

a patient already unwell from intensive therapy, these signs often get attributed to other causes. Time passes, and the infection progresses.

Specific blood tests can indicate a fungal diagnosis before imaging shows anything definitive. They are not available everywhere in India, and that gap costs lives. Apart from the economic burden of IFIs, it can disrupt cancer treatment schedules, delaying chemotherapy or transplantation and potentially compromising long-term disease control.

What Families Should Know

Preventive antifungal therapy for high-risk patients has strong evidence behind it. Centers that have built awareness of fungal infection risk into their standard care protocols consistently see better outcomes.

For families, the most important thing is simply knowing this risk exists. Asking about it is entirely reasonable. Expecting it to be actively managed is also reasonable. In hematology and oncology, the infections that go unrecognised are the ones that do most of the damage.

Invasive fungal infections are not merely infectious complications; they are major determinants of outcomes in modern hematology and oncology practice. Recognizing the hidden burden of IFIs is the first step toward reducing their impact and improving outcomes for our most vulnerable patients.