Dr. Kerry Courneya

So this fear of cancer recurrence can paralyze these patients as they continually go through this surveillance.

And at no point can we ever tell them that the cancer is definitively gone.

In some cancers, there's recurrences 10, 15, 20 years later.

So this is very stressful.

So the impact we showed in this study of exercise helping them manage that fear of cancer progression or fear of cancer recurrence, really important.

Helping them get on with their daily lives to say, I have to live my life with cancer in the background, even though I have this psychological stress.

So yeah, those psychological benefits are,

I think are really important for these patients in addition to some of the functional benefits and the disease-related benefits and controlling the side effects.

Yeah, I think that's definitely part of the explanation is some of these benefits.

But as you know, there's good biological effects as well on depression, on neurotransmitters, these types of things.

So there's a biological basis for some of these improvements in things like anxiety and depression.

But some of these other...

improvements, things like self-esteem is just patients feeling better about themselves because they're doing something that they believe is helping themselves.

So these are all important psychological changes.

And the big difference, you know, we look at all those literatures outside of cancer related to depression and cognitive function and anxiety and so on.

But in patients, you know, you're dealing with depression based on a cancer diagnosis and depression based on treatments and stuff.

So what we've been able to show is exercise helps with the anxiety, the depression, and the stress associated with a cancer diagnosis and treatments and side effects that we weren't sure they were going to help with.

So it really helps manage some of that psychological stress caused by the cancer and its treatments.

Yeah, we think about it exercise having benefits across the continuum of cancer care.

So from the time of diagnosis and for the balance of life.