Dr. Kerry Courneya

Of course, that's small compared to the impact of not smoking.

But it shows that exercise works within these groups to lower the risk

Whatever is kind of driving your risk, whether it's obesity, whether it's smoking, you can benefit from it.

The genetic stuff, we haven't seen quite as much evidence yet.

You know, the BRCA genes you talked about, there's like an 80% chance of getting breast cancer and very high with ovarian and some of these other ones.

So you're almost on a kind of...

genetic trajectory, that would be very hard to stop with a lifestyle change.

So I haven't seen as much evidence there suggesting that it can be beneficial for those patients.

There's other options for those patients in trying to reduce their risk.

And we've seen some of the studies look at that, trying to look at kind of, and just do it, as you say, by family history, a very simple way of looking at it.

And we do find that exercise lowers the risk of developing some of these cancers, even in those who have a family history.

Yeah.

So what we see in the cancer prevention literature is there is a dose response association, as we say.

So that means the more exercise you do, the greater the risk reduction.

So even though we can kind of look at different cut points and say, here's kind of amount of exercise that will give you a benefit, we know that more is better.

And there's various ways of getting that more.

One of it, as you pointed out, is increasing the intensity, but also increasing the frequency or increasing their duration.

And what you see with the exercise guidelines nowadays, if they've almost backed off any recommendations in terms of the frequency duration component, doesn't really matter how you slice and dice that exercise.

So this guideline of 150 minutes per week, we used to say five days per week for 30 minutes.

And then we used to say, OK, well, spread it out over at least three days and in minimum durations of 10 minutes.