Dr. Kerry Courneya

So again, depending on the types of treatments, certain types and amounts of exercise may be more beneficial.

Yeah, so that was one of the concerns of the clinicians when we first approached them about the patients.

Oh, maybe exercise is going to increase the testosterone and help this prostate cancer grow.

So a couple of things.

One, these drugs are so powerful.

They take testosterone down to castrate levels.

The small impact of exercise, the doctors are not worried that it's going to override that.

But also those effects you're talking about tend to be just acute effects.

The chronic effect can be a little bit of a reduction in testosterone.

But it is one of the explanations for why exercise might increase, say, prostate cancer risk.

Some of the studies are mixed on that.

Well, if it's driving testosterone levels.

But in the context of cancer treatment, it would be very, very small compared to what these powerful drugs do.

So as I mentioned, you know, most cancers get treated with a combination of treatments that we give in different combinations and different sequences.

So these patients are very heavily treated.

When we think about exercise as a monotherapy, we think about exercise by itself.

What's the effects of exercise by itself on cancer?

So we've done the preclinical studies in mice.

We can take these mice, we can inject small number of cancer cells or implant small cancer tumors, and we can randomly assign them to exercise versus no exercise, just like the drug.

researchers would do, drug versus not.