The Exercise That Protects Older Adults From Cancer

The relationship between exercise and cancer has sometimes been laden with confusion, and in particular, it was long popularly believed that exercise accelerates cancer once it occurs, but now it seems that’s not the case.

You might have read about that, and specifically about how a research team (Dr. Alice Avancini et al.) analysed data from 22 randomized controlled trials (total n=968 participants) that investigated the effects of exercise on various pro-inflammatory biomarkers (mostly interleukin variants, but also c-reactive proteins) that are known to increase breast cancer reoccurrence risk.

What they found was:

❝Exercise induced small to large significant reductions in IL-6 (SMD = -0.85; 95% CI = -1.68 to -0.02; p = .05) and TNF-α (SMD = -0.40; 95% CI = -0.81 to 0.01; p = .05) and a trend for a decrease in CRP.

When stratifying by exercise mode, trends toward reduction in IL-6 and TNF-α were observed for combined exercise, whilst changes were not generally affected by exercise program duration❞

Source: Effects of exercise on inflammation in female survivors of nonmetastatic breast cancer: a systematic review and meta-analysis

The “combined exercise” mentioned?

Aerobic exercise and resistance training.

This is important, because as regular 10almonds readers may remember…

What Your Metabolism Says About How Aggressive Cancer Is Likely To Be For You ← this makes a huge difference to survival chances

So, this study’s findings are very consistent with that, because:

• Aerobic training increases cardiovascular fitness, improving metabolism
• Resistance training increases muscle mass, improving metabolism*

*because muscle “costs” calories to maintain, prompting an increase in metabolism, whereas fat prompts our metabolism to slow, to conserve energy to face the obvious food shortage that must be coming

See also: Stop Cancer 20 Years Ago

Exercise & aging muscle

Yes, we said “older adults” specifically in the title, and now we’re getting to that part!

Most recently, another team of scientists (Dr. Jun Nishiyama et al.) that healthy skeletal* muscle acts as an anti-tumor organ, releasing tiny particles called extracellular vesicles (EVs) that help suppress the development of tumors.

^{*This means the muscles that move your skeleton, as opposed to different kinds of muscle such as, for example, the smooth muscle that operates the peristaltic motion of your intestines, or that forms the main part of the walls of your uterus (if you have one), or that wiggle your ears, and so forth.}

As muscles age and lose mass (per sarcopenia), they produce fewer of these vesicles. The vesicles that are released also contain lower levels of a molecule (known as miR-7a-5p to its friends) that normally helps restrain tumor growth. As a result, aging muscle can lose a lot of its natural cancer-fighting ability.

The good news is that exercise appears to reverse part of this process. The researchers found that physical activity reactivates a biological pathway involved in EV production, restoring the release of protective signals from muscle.

In other words: exercise more (be it with aerobic activity or resistance training, though ideally both), and greatly reduce your risk of cancer.

You can find this paper in full, here: Sarcopenia promotes tumorigenesis by disrupting NOTCH-SDC2-regulated biogenesis of muscle-derived extracellular vesicles

Want to learn more?

You might like this excellent book we reviewed:

Moving Through Cancer – by Dr. Kathryn Schmitz

Take care!