Dr. Kerry Courneya

Some are radiosensitive.

Some are radioresistant.

We've even seen in immunotherapy that we make incredible gains with certain types of cancers.

But in other cancers, immunotherapy doesn't seem to be effective at all.

So we need to think this way about exercise.

Exercise is not going to be a magic bullet for all these cancers.

So it seems to help with certain cancers more so than others.

And, you know, when you think on the prevention side of things, their strongest association seems to be with colon cancer.

So those cells might be particularly sensitive.

Breast cancer has a strong association, where some other cancers we don't see much of an association, like rectal cancer, prostate cancer, and stuff as well.

So the different types of cancer...

We might find cancers that are exercise resistant and cancers that are exercise sensitive, depending on the types of mutations that are driving those cancers.

But in addition to the types of cancers affecting the type and benefits of exercise, it's also really the treatments.

what treatments the patient's on might determine what type of exercise is best, what amount of exercise is best.

And to give you one example, we've really found a really good fit between weight training and a treatment for prostate cancer called androgen deprivation therapy.

So men get diagnosed with prostate cancer, one of the main treatments is to eliminate their testosterone, because testosterone fuels the growth of prostate cancer.

So they're given these drugs which take them down to castrate levels of testosterone.

That's fantastic for the prostate cancer,

but it's not very good for the man in terms of health, strength, muscle weakness, and these types of things.

So these guys who are on these androgen deprivation therapies, we've done multiple studies with weight training, and that seems to be a really effective intervention for these guys to regain their strength, regain their muscle, and improvements in things like fatigue and energy.