Dr. Kerry Courneya

And what we show is, just to give you the pattern of it, we asked many of these long-term survivors what they were doing before diagnosis, what they were doing during treatment, and what they were doing after treatment.

And what all this research shows is that a cancer diagnosis and treatment has a very negative impact on exercise levels.

All of these patients report doing dramatically less exercise during treatment than they were doing before diagnosis.

After treatments and survivorship, exercise will tend to increase back, but not back to pre-diagnosis levels.

So it's like the diagnosis and treatment of cancer is kind of having a permanent negative impact on exercise levels.

So what this tells me is that if we don't intervene, we're not helping patients exercise.

If oncologists and cancer centers aren't working with patients, the natural response of anyone diagnosed with cancer is to sort of give up exercise, get through these treatments, and try and recover afterwards.

So this is why interventions and support in cancer centers from the American Cancer Society are all very important.

And when we ask, during treatments in some of our studies, no more than 5% to 10% of patients were meeting the exercise guidelines during treatments.

bumps up to 30% to 40% after treatment.

So again, there's some sort of recovery afterwards there, but they're still lower levels.

When we compare cancer survivors with the general population, it's not much of a difference overall in terms of the physical activity levels.

They're similar between the general population and cancer survivors, but it varies, as you can imagine, by cancer type, cancer stage.

So some cancers like breast and prostate and colon, the exercise levels are reasonable.

But some of the more difficult cancers like brain cancer, liver cancer, pancreatic cancer, the exercise levels are much lower.

And of course, for the stage four metastatic disease, again, we see that having a very negative impact on exercise levels.

So there's lots of variation there.

But cancer in general and treatments in general will tend to have a negative impact on patients' exercise levels.

And they need that support to be able to exercise right after diagnosis.

Great question, and you're right.