Workouts Help to Treat Cancer

Exercise improves survival, limits recurrence, and can be used with surgery and drugs

- BY LYDIA DENWORTH

TO IMPROVE THE QUALITY of life of people with cancer, oncologists have regularly recommended exercise. Staying fit can make patients feel and function better. But exercise itself was never considered a formal treatment for the disease.

“The thinking in the medical community was that you need biomedical interventions—surgery, radiation therapy, drugs—to treat cancer,” says Kerry Courneya, a professor of kinesiology at the University of Alberta who studies physical activity and cancer.

That thinking is changing.

This year strong evidence emerged that exercise lengthens survival times and lowers recurrence risk for several cancer types. Such benefits are usually ascribed to medicine or surgery. But “exercise treats cancer as well as, if not better than, some of the current drugs that we’re offering our patients,” says Courneya, who led the first large randomized, controlled trial of the effects of workouts on cancer outcomes. It was published in July in the New England Journal of Medicine and involved more than 800 colon cancer patients. Participants with stage 3 and high-risk stage 2 cancer were assigned to a structured exercise program in addition to their oncology care. In a 10-year followup period, these people had a 28 percent lower risk of cancer recurrence, new cancers or death than similar patients who received only educational material about physical activity.