Exercise helps prevent cancer & helps people recover from cancer treatment....

Today's Post: Thursday, 2-2-2012

Research on those two subjects came out this week.

1. The one on preventing prostate cancer with exercise was good to know since in my family there is a family history of it.

I found it very nice to know that the exercise I’ve already been getting has given me the extra benefit of adding to the many things I’m doing to prevent cancer, prostate cancer, and aggressive prostate cancer.

But the information on HOW they discovered it works means that exercise also likely helps prevent ALL cancers! That’s huge. It’s front page news important!

2. People who get chemo or radiation treatment for cancer quite often feel impaired, less mentally sharp, and have a reduced quality of life. (That’s in addition to the stress of worrying about the cancer!)

The second study found that exercise can and did reverse a good bit of all that!

That too is huge. It’s front page news important!

1. The first study was in this story: “Science Shows How Exercise Might Help in Prostate Cancer By Steven Reinberg TUESDAY, Jan. 31 (HealthDay News)

Apparently the research was done by a team led by June Chan, associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics, and urology at the University of California, San Francisco.

They found that vigorous exercise caused changes to the expression of 180 genes.

(In case you haven’t yet heard, it seems we don’t inherit genes that have only one setting. We mostly inherit genes that either have several settings or can be switched on or off, “expressed” or not “expressed.”)

Apparently the exercisers switched ON genes known to suppress tumor growth. And they switched ON genes that repair DNA.

The researchers were careful and said exercise could help prevent or delay progression of the disease.

Clearly exercise did cause the desirable things to happen! In a given person that might or might not be enough just like putting water on a fire.

The men who got the good effects did a total of at least three hours a week of exercise or activity than is or often is vigorous. The men in the study did running, swimming, and played tennis but that much vigorous exercise every week was the key.

The researchers found direct evidence that exercise likely also helps prevent breast cancer in women.

That’s because two of the genes more expressed in the men who exercised are two of the best known to suppress breast cancer, BRCA1 & BRCA2.

The men who exercised had increased expression of genes involved in DNA repair. That means that small cancers might get fixed before they get larger.

And they also expressed genes that tended to turn off or stop or slow the growth of cancers.

To me that means that if you want to not get cancer or have it be slow growing enough you have a shot at surviving it, exercise averaging about half an hour a day can be a huge help.

Note that if you don’t now exercise, the sooner you begin and the sooner you build up to the 3 hours a week – as long as you don’t rush it and overdo – the sooner you begin, the sooner you get this protection!

2. What if you get cancer and then get it treated with chemo or radiation?

Wouldn’t it be nice if your recovery and quality of life and mental ability went well or at least better than it now often does?

Apparently doing both cardio and strength training each week even if you just begin exercising after the treatment does exactly that!

The second study was in this story: “WEDNESDAY, Feb. 1 (HealthDay News) -- Exercise can improve the health, energy and well-being of cancer patients after they've completed their main cancer treatment, a new review finds.”

Women just treated for breast cancer who then went on an exercise program -- "....showed improvements in” things that exercise normally does such as better blood sugar control & getting less fat & their legs got stronger

But the front page news is that they also got better in vitally important ways to recover from the treatment. They had less fatigue and depression, and their quality of life improved.

Patients with other types of cancer who exercised got similar improvements. They got stronger as measured by hand-grip strength, and they became more fit.

But the key thing is that they too improved with less depression and better quality of life.

Also breast cancer patients found that aerobic exercise AND doing some kind of strength training was much more effective.

Breast cancer patients who did both got better results “on physical fitness, emotional fitness, overall well-being and fears about breast cancer….” They got better results than the women who did only cardio.

(Doing some strength training too was a huge help in other words.)

Other research on exercise and its benefits also show that doing some cardio AND some strength training each week provides better results than just doing cardio. So that part might have been expected. The results were the same.

There was some variation in the results. Younger people tended to do better for example. The researchers speculated that might have been because the younger patients were able to do more exercise.

Similarly, I suspect that people who were doing such exercise before their treatment and resumed after the treatment or began doing closer to their prior routine would also do better. (They too would be able to do more exercise after the treatments.)

The bottom line is that that doing regular and vigorous exercise doing both cardio and strength training each week gives you two huge benefits.

It makes getting cancer or bad cancer less likely AND it can help your recovery go MUCH better if you do wind up getting chemo or radiation treatment for cancer.