Dr. Kerry Courneya

As I mentioned, cancer patients will say everything about cancer is not normal.

And when they exercise, they start to feel like they have some control over the cancer and that their normal life.

I'm out playing tennis or I'm out golfing.

I feel like I'm normal again.

So these psychological benefits can be things like improved self-confidence, improved self-esteem, certainly managing the anxiety associated with cancer.

And you mentioned the finding related to fear of cancer progression or fear of cancer recurrence.

This is a huge issue in cancer patients.

You can imagine being diagnosed with cancer.

You go through the different treatments.

At the end of the treatments, we tell the patient, there's no evidence of disease.

We've done the scans.

We've done the various other tests.

We think it's gone.

How will we know it's gone?

Well, we're going to follow up every six months, and we're going to do these tests, and then we're going to tell you whether the cancer's come back.

So we can't tell you definitively at the end of treatment that your cancer's gone, go back to your normal life.

We know these recurrences happen.

And now you can imagine every six months the anxiety and stress of going in and getting these imaging tests and blood tests and then meeting with your oncologist who's going to say,

The cancer's back or it's not.

And patients will tell you that finding out they've had a recurrence of the cancer is even more devastating than the initial diagnosis of the cancer.