Dr. Kerry Courneya

So lots of good evidence suggesting that even two days of a week of weight training can be very beneficial for these outcomes.

Yes, we did one trial we call the CARE trial, which stands for Combined Aerobic and Resistance Exercise in Breast Cancer Patients.

And we did find some additional benefits.

We did a high dose of aerobic exercise.

We did a moderate dose of aerobic exercise.

And then we did a combined aerobic and resistance exercise.

And of course, additional benefits in things like muscular strength, improvements in lean body mass, but even in some of the symptoms side effects, small additional benefits of combining the two.

But the best evidence definitely is exercise compared to nothing at all.

That really drives the benefits.

And once you start manipulating the exercise prescription, we can see some additional benefits for patients who are able and willing to do more exercise or able and willing to do a combined exercise program.

Yeah, so it was 75 minutes of vigorous in the sort of moderate group and then 150 minutes per week of vigorous in the high aerobic.

So it was more kind of the minimum guideline versus the optimal guideline for aerobic exercise.

So if we talk about influencing the primary tumor, and we've seen this in preclinical models, but also in the human studies, sometimes when we've got an existing primary tumor, the first treatment is not to surgically remove it.

The first treatment is to treat it with chemotherapy or radiation therapy and try and shrink or eliminate the tumor that way.

And so what they've shown in some of these preclinical models is if you're giving these mice

particular chemotherapy drug and exercise versus neither versus both, exercise combined with chemotherapy is more effective than exercise alone or chemotherapy alone.

What they've shown in these studies is that these primary tumors have a very poor vasculature.

It's poor quality blood vessels, they're leaky, and they're chaotic in there.

But all these tumors, in order to grow, they need to draw blood vessels.

They only grow to a very small size and unless they get blood vessels within them, they can't grow any larger.