Cancer Survivors Who Stay Active Live Longer
Can going for a walk improve cancer survivors’ long-term prognosis? It may, according to new research showing that exercise can lower survivors’ risk of premature death, not only from cancer but from any cause. The findings are likely to resonate widely at a time when about 14 million Americans, and many more worldwide, have survived cancer.
In one report, a major new review published this month in The Journal of the National Cancer Institute, scientists at the agency gathered available studies examining exercise and cancer survivorship, dating to 1950. Most had been published in the past five years.
“This is an area of growing scientific interest,” says Dr. Rachel Ballard-Barbash, the associate director for applied research at the National Cancer Institute and lead author of the study. “Exercise is an accessible, low-cost intervention. But before we can suggest that cancer survivors become physically active, we need to understand what effects exercise has” on the bodies and life spans of those who’ve been given a cancer diagnosis.
To date, messages about the effects of exercise on cancer patients have been mixed. Some physicians have worried that exercise might exacerbate the fatigue that is common after cancer treatment. Others have raised concerns that the physical stress of exercise could even create conditions within the body that might contribute to tumor recurrence.
A 2010 roundtable convened by the American College of Sports Medicine concluded that exercise appeared to be safe for most cancer survivors, but anyone whose treatment had involved drugs harmful to the heart muscle or bone density should be closely monitored. But those recommendations didn’t directly address the issue of whether or how exercise might affect tumor recurrence or to what degree exercise could affect a survivor’s overall life span.
So those became the concerns that Dr. Ballard-Barbash and her colleagues set out to examine in more detail.
In the end, they found 45 studies that looked at physical activity among people who’d received a diagnosis of cancer. The types of tumors studied included prostate, ovarian, brain and colorectal. But a majority of the studies, “as in most cancer research,” involved women who had survived breast cancer, Dr. Ballard-Barbash said. “There’s a lot of research money in that field,” so, in general, there is more available science.
Most of the studies also were observational, meaning that patients completed questionnaires about their activities, which can be unreliable since people may not accurately recall their true activity levels. Only a few were actual experiments, during which volunteers were assigned to exercise or to remain sedentary. And although none were designed expressly to determine what biochemical or genetic effects exercise might be having on cells within the body, several did look at various biomarkers that have been found to play a role in cancer recurrence and progression.
As it turned out, virtually all of the studies, whatever their methodology, showed that regular physical activity “decreased the risk of cancer-related mortality and of all-cause mortality,” Dr. Ballard-Barbash said.
Exercise, in other words, made it less likely that a survivor would subsequently die from a recurrence of his or her cancer.
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