Of course, you have to be well enough to exercise.
My mom was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer 11 years ago, at 59. She wasn't super into fitness when I was growing up (no time with 4 kids to raise). But ~5 years after her diagnosis, still doing regular treatments and on loads of medication, she picked up running as a hobby.
She is absolutely incredible and I'm so proud of her. But she would be the first to tell you about all of the friends she made who died of cancer, including many much younger and fitter women, and I know this is obvious but I'll say it: it wasn't because they didn't exercise, it's because they didn't respond well to treatment. She had to stop going to her support groups because literally everyone she met there had died[1]. She is so fortunate that she's responded well, enough that she was afforded the time to emerge from the shock and depression and realize that she had a lot of life left. We are so lucky that she's here with us and well enough to develop new hobbies, etc.
I do think the sort of information in the study is interesting on a population scale. On an individual level the fact is that some people will respond to treatment and others won't. The ones who do may just feel well enough to start an exercise program. If they can, it may well improve the quality of their life, and may extend your time with them, and that's an amazing gift.
I'm not sure why I felt compelled to share my anecdote. Maybe just to share what the messy human side can look like.
[1] I should note that her support group was specifically for people with a terminal diagnosis. People in any other type of breast cancer support group won't have this experience.
I used to believe exercise was for people who were "into fitness". I have come to realise it's for everyone, at the level of their capacity.
Exercise should be thought of like brushing teeth and other forms of basic self-care. You don't do it because you're interested. You do it because you were born into a body that needs it.
I went through the same evolution where I now understand it like brushing your teeth, exactly as you said. In fact, it’s even more important than brushing your teeth. I don’t think society teaches it this way but they should.
Yeah, I think that kind of view was more prevalent in the 90's and early 2000's, where media fed you with the most diehard of the disciplines, seeing a bone thin marathoner or a roided up weightlifter, and you're just like eh I 'm good with looking like me. It was often a looks thing or pushing your body to the absolute limits, or following some vhs or dvd program to get buff. But then we kept getting paper after paper about how it was measurably beneficial to your health to have some exercise and that you didn't have to go all in on these things to benefit; some of it you can do as you work.
I certainly grew up in the '90s, but for me it came from my parents. They were big on the idea that you had to find an active hobby you enjoy and then you get your exercise in that way. I never found one I could stick with so eventually I figured exercise just wasn't for me.
(These days I run and do bodyweight strength training a few days a week. I don't enjoy it and I certainly don't have time for it, but I sacrifice other things because it's good for me, both today and 30 years from now. (I picked these things specifically because (a) they give me the most results in the least investment in time and equipment, and (b) they get me to go outside even in not-so-great weather.))
Thank you for sharing. I have a similar experience with my father who was diagnosed a few years older than your mother. Chemo made it really difficult to do anything for a day or two after. Winters made it worse. I'm not sure how much exercise he could even participate in with a colostomy.
individual cases have so many differences. Cancer is a nightmare
11 years is a incredible. All the best to you and your family
In this study they assigned people randomly to get either an exercise program or health education. So it's not a self-selected group of exercise fanatics vs couch potatoes, and so long as they track people assigned to the exercise group who drop out properly it should be valid.
I think the biggest benefit I get from exercise is psychological. If I am having a busy day and I skip exercise to get more work time it is almost always a mistake because I wind up spinning my wheels.
Responding well to the treatment = basically the cancer cells haven't picked up any of the worst gene mutations that we don't have an effective countermeasurement against. So it's all about luck. And fate, if you believe fate is just a manifestation of luck. I wish the best will still keep coming to her.
Massively editorialized title. The actual title is “Structured Exercise after Adjuvant Chemotherapy for Colon Cancer” which is much more narrow than the current title which implies exercise increases all cancer survival rates (it might but that’s not what this study shows).
When my wife had cancer the only exercise she could do was walking - but she did it religiously. 3-4 miles every day - except chemo days off. On days after chemo it was 6 short walks. On healthier days it was longer fast walks - the goal was the average. I think in addition to physical health it helps mentally also.
Horizontal studies are so hard. There is so much modern medicine can't always incorporate into studies that are confounders.
For example the gut brain connection is not well understood. Links between autoimmune responses to cancer can cause all kinds of problems that can seem unrelated(an example is myotonia which appeared in one of my relatives a full year before their breast cancer diagnosis and went away after treatment). I recently read in the times an article about the discovery of another circulatory system apart from the one we have; apparently acupuncture may get a more scientific and serious look into because it interacts with that system. There is also the business of how psychiatry schools still are not teaching how to not treat the brain as if it's an isolated organ, a wholisiti approach is being only now taught in all but a handful of schools(I think this was in the economist).
Does this end up filtering out those who cannot maintain regular exercise from the exercise group? Otherwise isn't this just filtering for the healthier subjects?
I wonder (no access to full text here) how they control for patients no longer able to do the exercise? Do those remain in the cohort, or are they removed (would bias the end result, so unlikely to get past review or into NEJM)? Or is that why they screened so long and so hard as selection criteria are super rigorous?
They're definitely is a point of diminishing returns and a point where it can have negative outcomes but that's on the very extreme end. I also saw recently that there's a correlation between ultra marathons and colon cancer
It's common for people that do endurance sports to actually eat pretty low quality food in order to consume enough carbs. When I'm on bike trips I will pretty much eat just about anything including candy and things like maltodextrin in water just to keep myself going when I normally wouldn't eat these things. It's definitely not good for your gut. But overall is it better than being sedentary? Yes definitely
There's a joke amongst sports medicine docs that runners are going to ignore their advice. Standard advice for some types of injuries is to take it easy for a few weeks. Most athletes will be fairly compliant, but many runners won't.
From my observations, that applies to weightlifters/powerlifters as well. They'll back off if they are so injured that they physically cannot lift, but otherwise many will try to "push through" injuries and overtraining.
I personally believe that exercise is overwhelmingly beneficial and exercise every day, but there is evidence that athletes have slightly increased risk of ALS (though this may be related to something other than exercise itself, eg maybe the fields on which sports teams play have harmful chemicals, higher head injury rates, etc)
Like most things, there’s a U-shaped curve to the benefits and downsides of exercise.
Exercise creates a lot of oxidative stress, and after a while or too much exercise your body can’t handle the oxidative stress and that’s where things start going wrong.
For a long time people with multiple sclerosis were discouraged from exercising. It wasn't until like the 1990s that exercise was recommended. All to say science is ever-evolving.
like there's no doubt that exercise overall is good for you but if you're the kind of person who regularly runs marathons and does the training you are at higher risk of A-Fib and you may have all kinds of abnormal findings with the stethoscope, echocardiograms and such and... you might go to one cardiologist and they will be all freaked out and another one will think it's a nothingburger. I've been told I shouldn't do more than an hour of cardio a day: like back in my time in the wilderness when I was trying to invent ChatGPT 10 years too early and doing a gangbusters job filling the top of a sales funnel but never making sales, doing twice that helped me keep calm and sustain the effort.
In this forum? Every american is going to say that exercise destroys your joints and would take Ozempic for the rest of their life rather than run a 5K around their block.
I'm an american and I think relying on any long-term medication is a failure of sorts. I know that that's not totally fair and I try not to judge anyone else but that's my feeling for myself. I don't take any prescription meds aside from occasional antibiotics for infections but it's been at least a decade since I even did that. I would not be on board with any long-term prescriptions if I had not exhausted every possible change in diet and behavior first.
Well I blew my knees when I was 21 doing mountain bike rides where I went up a vertical mile. The summer between undergrad and grad schools I remember riding my bike to a Ross Perot rally and being in agony. I've found a lot of things I can do but I have to be sparing about running and can't even look at a bike anymore. I did enough heavy cardio training to get abnormal findings in my echo and A-Fib observered in a Holter monitor [1]
I've been heavy for a long time despite doing a lot of exercise and the one thing that worked for losing weight before Zepbound was that time I (1) had something like a manic episode and during that (2) discovered the weird pain that had been moving between my upper back, shoulders and neck for decades was really caused by trouble with my TMJ and had six months where I just threw random foods (let's say pork loin, seaweed, carrots and turnip, it was a running gag to put together the strangest combinations I could) into a pot and blend them with an immersion blender before cooking... and it cleared up.
My nutritionist now who is supervising my weight loss is pretty happy that I'm an exerciser but I haven't been doing quite as I'd like lately because I hurt my leg practicing theranthropy [2] and have had to pace myself, like developing isolated kettlebell exercises I can do at home that work my upper body without loading my quads though I am getting better and probably could start doing more whole-body stuff.
[1] ... which I don't quite believe, once I got into biofeedback I learned how to read two-lead EKGs and I can't really make out the P-wave a lot of the time and I don't think 10 bad heartbeats out of 10^6 evaled by a computer means anything
[2] ... if you gotta know I "go out-as-a-fox" to charm people to do street photography and part of that is "walking like an animal" while carrying a heavy loadout of equipment and learning to do that without putting too much stress on my body, it didn't help at all that I tried a pair of New Balance 1080's which were the worst shoes I've ever tried, like they caused more trouble than the high-heel boots I've worn going out in drag for halloween.
Americans are quite bifurcated on this topic, and although the population as a whole might be pretty out of shape there is a fairly large subset for whom exercise is practically a religion.
In my opinion, anything that lowers blood glucose is going to help cancer survival rates[1].
My father died of pancreatic cancer and both me and my sister-in-law who was a oncology nurse were frustrated with them, wanting to keep him eating those gross protein shakes that were filled with sugar.
There are some really good studies showing this. Dr. Walter Longo has been doing a study at USC for breast cancer patients. While his protocol is based on fasting, he believes a big reason for its success is the lower glucose.
Conclusions: This review suggests a possible association between high dietary sugar intake and increased prostate cancer risk, especially from added sugars and sugar-sweetened beverages. However, inconsistent findings and methodological limitations highlight the need for robust, prospective studies with standardized assessments to understand this relationship better.
"If you have pre-diabetes or diabetes, here’s another reason to try to get your blood sugar under control: if you get prostate cancer, you are more likely to die from it."
Of course, you have to be well enough to exercise.
My mom was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer 11 years ago, at 59. She wasn't super into fitness when I was growing up (no time with 4 kids to raise). But ~5 years after her diagnosis, still doing regular treatments and on loads of medication, she picked up running as a hobby.
She is absolutely incredible and I'm so proud of her. But she would be the first to tell you about all of the friends she made who died of cancer, including many much younger and fitter women, and I know this is obvious but I'll say it: it wasn't because they didn't exercise, it's because they didn't respond well to treatment. She had to stop going to her support groups because literally everyone she met there had died[1]. She is so fortunate that she's responded well, enough that she was afforded the time to emerge from the shock and depression and realize that she had a lot of life left. We are so lucky that she's here with us and well enough to develop new hobbies, etc.
I do think the sort of information in the study is interesting on a population scale. On an individual level the fact is that some people will respond to treatment and others won't. The ones who do may just feel well enough to start an exercise program. If they can, it may well improve the quality of their life, and may extend your time with them, and that's an amazing gift.
I'm not sure why I felt compelled to share my anecdote. Maybe just to share what the messy human side can look like.
[1] I should note that her support group was specifically for people with a terminal diagnosis. People in any other type of breast cancer support group won't have this experience.
I used to believe exercise was for people who were "into fitness". I have come to realise it's for everyone, at the level of their capacity.
Exercise should be thought of like brushing teeth and other forms of basic self-care. You don't do it because you're interested. You do it because you were born into a body that needs it.
I went through the same evolution where I now understand it like brushing your teeth, exactly as you said. In fact, it’s even more important than brushing your teeth. I don’t think society teaches it this way but they should.
Yeah, I think that kind of view was more prevalent in the 90's and early 2000's, where media fed you with the most diehard of the disciplines, seeing a bone thin marathoner or a roided up weightlifter, and you're just like eh I 'm good with looking like me. It was often a looks thing or pushing your body to the absolute limits, or following some vhs or dvd program to get buff. But then we kept getting paper after paper about how it was measurably beneficial to your health to have some exercise and that you didn't have to go all in on these things to benefit; some of it you can do as you work.
I certainly grew up in the '90s, but for me it came from my parents. They were big on the idea that you had to find an active hobby you enjoy and then you get your exercise in that way. I never found one I could stick with so eventually I figured exercise just wasn't for me.
(These days I run and do bodyweight strength training a few days a week. I don't enjoy it and I certainly don't have time for it, but I sacrifice other things because it's good for me, both today and 30 years from now. (I picked these things specifically because (a) they give me the most results in the least investment in time and equipment, and (b) they get me to go outside even in not-so-great weather.))
Thank you for sharing. I have a similar experience with my father who was diagnosed a few years older than your mother. Chemo made it really difficult to do anything for a day or two after. Winters made it worse. I'm not sure how much exercise he could even participate in with a colostomy.
individual cases have so many differences. Cancer is a nightmare
11 years is a incredible. All the best to you and your family
In this study they assigned people randomly to get either an exercise program or health education. So it's not a self-selected group of exercise fanatics vs couch potatoes, and so long as they track people assigned to the exercise group who drop out properly it should be valid.
I think the biggest benefit I get from exercise is psychological. If I am having a busy day and I skip exercise to get more work time it is almost always a mistake because I wind up spinning my wheels.
Responding well to the treatment = basically the cancer cells haven't picked up any of the worst gene mutations that we don't have an effective countermeasurement against. So it's all about luck. And fate, if you believe fate is just a manifestation of luck. I wish the best will still keep coming to her.
They need to separate all these studies by age group. Age is the biggest risk factor in cancer.
Nothing really works if you are old.
Massively editorialized title. The actual title is “Structured Exercise after Adjuvant Chemotherapy for Colon Cancer” which is much more narrow than the current title which implies exercise increases all cancer survival rates (it might but that’s not what this study shows).
When my wife had cancer the only exercise she could do was walking - but she did it religiously. 3-4 miles every day - except chemo days off. On days after chemo it was 6 short walks. On healthier days it was longer fast walks - the goal was the average. I think in addition to physical health it helps mentally also.
Horizontal studies are so hard. There is so much modern medicine can't always incorporate into studies that are confounders.
For example the gut brain connection is not well understood. Links between autoimmune responses to cancer can cause all kinds of problems that can seem unrelated(an example is myotonia which appeared in one of my relatives a full year before their breast cancer diagnosis and went away after treatment). I recently read in the times an article about the discovery of another circulatory system apart from the one we have; apparently acupuncture may get a more scientific and serious look into because it interacts with that system. There is also the business of how psychiatry schools still are not teaching how to not treat the brain as if it's an isolated organ, a wholisiti approach is being only now taught in all but a handful of schools(I think this was in the economist).
Does this end up filtering out those who cannot maintain regular exercise from the exercise group? Otherwise isn't this just filtering for the healthier subjects?
I wonder (no access to full text here) how they control for patients no longer able to do the exercise? Do those remain in the cohort, or are they removed (would bias the end result, so unlikely to get past review or into NEJM)? Or is that why they screened so long and so hard as selection criteria are super rigorous?
I have never seen a study saying exercise is bad for you.
They're definitely is a point of diminishing returns and a point where it can have negative outcomes but that's on the very extreme end. I also saw recently that there's a correlation between ultra marathons and colon cancer
It's common for people that do endurance sports to actually eat pretty low quality food in order to consume enough carbs. When I'm on bike trips I will pretty much eat just about anything including candy and things like maltodextrin in water just to keep myself going when I normally wouldn't eat these things. It's definitely not good for your gut. But overall is it better than being sedentary? Yes definitely
There's a joke amongst sports medicine docs that runners are going to ignore their advice. Standard advice for some types of injuries is to take it easy for a few weeks. Most athletes will be fairly compliant, but many runners won't.
From my observations, that applies to weightlifters/powerlifters as well. They'll back off if they are so injured that they physically cannot lift, but otherwise many will try to "push through" injuries and overtraining.
Also, sometimes marathon/ultra people will skimp on sleep and rest, which will have negative outcomes.
That definitely is not ideal but if you are just doing it very short term during an event it's probably fine
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10151186/
I personally believe that exercise is overwhelmingly beneficial and exercise every day, but there is evidence that athletes have slightly increased risk of ALS (though this may be related to something other than exercise itself, eg maybe the fields on which sports teams play have harmful chemicals, higher head injury rates, etc)
Like most things, there’s a U-shaped curve to the benefits and downsides of exercise.
Exercise creates a lot of oxidative stress, and after a while or too much exercise your body can’t handle the oxidative stress and that’s where things start going wrong.
Didn't they link it to pesticide use at golf courses ?
For a long time people with multiple sclerosis were discouraged from exercising. It wasn't until like the 1990s that exercise was recommended. All to say science is ever-evolving.
There is a lot of controversy about
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/23920-athlete...
like there's no doubt that exercise overall is good for you but if you're the kind of person who regularly runs marathons and does the training you are at higher risk of A-Fib and you may have all kinds of abnormal findings with the stethoscope, echocardiograms and such and... you might go to one cardiologist and they will be all freaked out and another one will think it's a nothingburger. I've been told I shouldn't do more than an hour of cardio a day: like back in my time in the wilderness when I was trying to invent ChatGPT 10 years too early and doing a gangbusters job filling the top of a sales funnel but never making sales, doing twice that helped me keep calm and sustain the effort.
In this forum? Every american is going to say that exercise destroys your joints and would take Ozempic for the rest of their life rather than run a 5K around their block.
I'm an american and I think relying on any long-term medication is a failure of sorts. I know that that's not totally fair and I try not to judge anyone else but that's my feeling for myself. I don't take any prescription meds aside from occasional antibiotics for infections but it's been at least a decade since I even did that. I would not be on board with any long-term prescriptions if I had not exhausted every possible change in diet and behavior first.
Well I blew my knees when I was 21 doing mountain bike rides where I went up a vertical mile. The summer between undergrad and grad schools I remember riding my bike to a Ross Perot rally and being in agony. I've found a lot of things I can do but I have to be sparing about running and can't even look at a bike anymore. I did enough heavy cardio training to get abnormal findings in my echo and A-Fib observered in a Holter monitor [1]
I've been heavy for a long time despite doing a lot of exercise and the one thing that worked for losing weight before Zepbound was that time I (1) had something like a manic episode and during that (2) discovered the weird pain that had been moving between my upper back, shoulders and neck for decades was really caused by trouble with my TMJ and had six months where I just threw random foods (let's say pork loin, seaweed, carrots and turnip, it was a running gag to put together the strangest combinations I could) into a pot and blend them with an immersion blender before cooking... and it cleared up.
My nutritionist now who is supervising my weight loss is pretty happy that I'm an exerciser but I haven't been doing quite as I'd like lately because I hurt my leg practicing theranthropy [2] and have had to pace myself, like developing isolated kettlebell exercises I can do at home that work my upper body without loading my quads though I am getting better and probably could start doing more whole-body stuff.
[1] ... which I don't quite believe, once I got into biofeedback I learned how to read two-lead EKGs and I can't really make out the P-wave a lot of the time and I don't think 10 bad heartbeats out of 10^6 evaled by a computer means anything
[2] ... if you gotta know I "go out-as-a-fox" to charm people to do street photography and part of that is "walking like an animal" while carrying a heavy loadout of equipment and learning to do that without putting too much stress on my body, it didn't help at all that I tried a pair of New Balance 1080's which were the worst shoes I've ever tried, like they caused more trouble than the high-heel boots I've worn going out in drag for halloween.
Americans are quite bifurcated on this topic, and although the population as a whole might be pretty out of shape there is a fairly large subset for whom exercise is practically a religion.
Falsified. I'm an American and I don't say that.
Fork found in kitchen
In my opinion, anything that lowers blood glucose is going to help cancer survival rates[1].
My father died of pancreatic cancer and both me and my sister-in-law who was a oncology nurse were frustrated with them, wanting to keep him eating those gross protein shakes that were filled with sugar.
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12889-024-19545-z
There are some really good studies showing this. Dr. Walter Longo has been doing a study at USC for breast cancer patients. While his protocol is based on fasting, he believes a big reason for its success is the lower glucose.
I think you are right. Fasting and low sugar diets should also help.
No. Glucose has nothing to do with prostate cancer.
What?
https://www.mdpi.com/2673-7523/5/3/31
(2025)
Conclusions: This review suggests a possible association between high dietary sugar intake and increased prostate cancer risk, especially from added sugars and sugar-sweetened beverages. However, inconsistent findings and methodological limitations highlight the need for robust, prospective studies with standardized assessments to understand this relationship better.
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/articles/2017/12/high-b...
"If you have pre-diabetes or diabetes, here’s another reason to try to get your blood sugar under control: if you get prostate cancer, you are more likely to die from it."
i am guessing you didnt read your own comment
Another feather in the cap of the undisputed champion of health studies.
If the results of regular exercise could be put in a pill, it'd be the most amazing miracle pill of all time.
What are they gonna figure it next - vegetables are good for you too ?!?