Dr. Kerry Courneya

we have to be careful that we're not over-treating cancer and, of course, we're not under-treating cancer.

So right now, we over-treat a lot of patients because we're not sure if they have any remaining disease, but we just want to be sure.

And so they get all these treatments that they ultimately didn't end up needing.

So one of the advantages of this testing on the post-treatment side of things is if there is no evidence of any circulating tumor cells, circulating tumor DNA, we can potentially de-escalate the treatments and say you don't need any further treatments right now.

For the patient that test is positive, we probably do want additional treatments if there's evidence that there's still a small number of cancer cells around.

So usually we'll recommend additional chemotherapy or immunotherapy depending on what the doctors find.

So yeah, check with your oncologist if that's already built into the clinical care or whether that's something that would be recommended.

Yeah, so again, we have a lot of research suggesting that.

It's still experimental, but I still think it is one of the few things that patients can do themselves, right?

Everything else is done to them, done for them in terms of the chemotherapy, the surgery, and so on.

So patients are looking for what sorts of things can I do myself?

And exercise probably has the strongest evidence of additional potential benefit beyond sort of their current treatments.

So yeah, I think in some of these cancers, we are going to be able to show that there's absolutely benefits to improved outcomes for these patients.

Yeah, there are some differences among the cancers.

So even though we use the term cancer like it's a singular disease, you know, it's a collection of over 100 different diseases.

And all the mutations that drive these cancers can be different.

So not everything is going to be sensitive or receptive to an exercise intervention.

But we see this with all treatments, right?

Some cancers are chemosensitive.

Some are chemoresistant.