Dr. Kerry Courneya

And we can show in those studies that exercise by itself, independent of any other treatments, tends to slow the growth and spread of these cancers.

Most of the studies are showing that.

Not all, but most of the studies.

So then you think of clinical scenarios.

Well, if all these patients are getting treated, what's the relevance of that clinical scenario?

But there's a new clinical scenario in cancer.

And as I mentioned before, there's concern that some of these small, low-grade cancers, maybe we're over-treating them.

Maybe we're jumping in and treating these patients, causing all sorts of side effects, not to mention the medical costs and so on.

Maybe they don't need to be treated.

And this whole approach to managing cancer is now called active surveillance.

So these cancers are so small and so low-grade, slow-growing that we're not going to jump in and treat these cancers with anything.

It's being used mostly right now in prostate cancer.

That's where they've pioneered this active surveillance.

But it's starting to get attention even in other cancers about maybe some of these cancers we don't need to jump in and treat right away.

So now you've got these guys diagnosed with prostate cancer and they're not giving any treatments whatsoever.

So this has allowed lifestyle researchers to kind of jump in and say, what's the role of lifestyle here?

Can we help these guys out at all?

So we've done a recent study looking at high-intensity interval training in these men with prostate cancer who are on active surveillance, no other treatments.

In addition to improvements in fitness and function and the types of things you might expect, we also showed that this high-intensity exercise lowered prostate-specific antigen levels, PSA levels.

So this is how men are sometimes screened for prostate cancer.