Dr. Kerry Courneya

It will push all the immune cells out into the system to potentially track down some of these circulating or disseminating tumor cells, but it also increases immunodelivery to the actual primary tumor as well.

Now, exercise, to your point,

can be immunosuppressive as well, right?

We know these very high levels of exercise, the kind of triathletes and the marathon runners, right?

It can cause immunosuppression.

And this was one of the reasons some oncologists early on were concerned about exercise, right?

These patients can become immunosuppressive from the chemotherapy treatments and other treatments.

So they were a bit concerned with the very high intensity exercise in these patients.

But most of what we're studying and looking at is more the moderate intensity or the higher intensity exercise, but for reasonable amounts of exercise, not sort of these marathon runners or these triathletes where you might overwhelm the patient.

Yes.

Yeah, we don't have a public health concern about too many people exercising too much.

It does happen.

There is such a thing as exercise addiction and overdoing it and overtraining, so on.

But that is a very small slice of the population.

Yeah, based on the mechanism, then anything that increases that blood flow should work.

So some of the research that's been done has been more of a preclinical in vitro model.

So there's researchers who develop these plastic tubes, rubber kind of tubes, and they can spin blood through these tubes faster or slower.

And then they can put these circulating tumor cells in this sort of

micro fluidic system that they've developed and they can spin them around faster and slower.

And they show that the faster you spin these around consistent with what might happen during exercise, the more of these cells that die.