Dr. Kerry Courneya

So the initial diagnosis helping you prepare for treatments.

Once you start treatment, help you get through those treatments and complete those treatments.

Afterwards, we're looking at recovery from those treatments.

And then after treatments, when you're in what we call the survivorship phase,

reducing the risk of recurrence, but also reducing the risk for other chronic diseases.

So unfortunately, many of the treatments that cancer patients get increase the risk for cardiovascular disease.

Some of these drugs are cardiotoxic, increase the risk of osteoporosis.

They increase the risk of diabetes.

So now you've kind of survived your cancer, but now you're trying to prevent some of these secondary diseases that might occur.

So there's lots of good reasons to exercise right across the cancer trajectory.

I mean, the other way I think about exercise in terms of its importance, when you look at what's currently being done for cancer patients, because a lot is being done.

So they're offered a lot of other complementary therapies, art therapy, music therapy, acupuncture, massage therapy, psychological counseling, stress management.

And these are all having benefits on symptoms, side effects, quality of life, just like exercise.

But none of those other interventions have shown any benefits for survival, any benefits for the disease itself or risk of recurrence.

And then you look at the treatments we give for cancer, like chemotherapy, radiation therapy.

All those interventions benefit the survival side of things, but they oftentimes undermine quality of life.

They make symptoms and side effects worse.

Exercise is one of these few interventions potentially for patients that can help both with quality of life, side effect symptoms, and also improve disease-free survival.

So it's a real win-win compared to many of these other interventions that we offer cancer patients.

Yeah, we've done a lot of those surveys.