FLICKR, D26B73Can exercising help treat cancer? The short answer is: we don’t know. At a session today (April 18) at the annual conference of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) in New Orleans, researchers discussed the epidemiological and preclinical work that has suggested exercise might be beneficial for cancer patients, and emphasized the need for more research to understand this complex relationship.
“We’ve got to do a better job of getting better data,” session chair Lee Jones of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center said. “We don’t even know to date if exercise has any efficacy in terms of anticancer benefits.”
In a review of the existing epidemiologic literature in this area, Christine Friedenreich of the University of Calgary, Canada, pointed to 10 studies on breast cancer patients, six studies involving colorectal cancer patients, and three studies on prostate cancer patients, which collectively provide “very strong evidence” of an antitumor benefit of physical activity, she said. However, these studies relied almost exclusively on subjective measures of exercise and failed to control for a variety of confounding factors, such as prediagnosis activity levels, sedentary behavior, and competing risks ...
