Dr. Kerry Courneya

Because once you get diagnosed with a chronic disease, sometimes the treatments happen fairly quickly.

And that window of getting fit and ready for the chronic disease and its treatments might be short.

So the other way to look at this sort of prevention lifestyle one is really prehabilitation for the eventuality.

Most Americans will be diagnosed with a chronic disease at some point in their life.

And many of them will be diagnosed with multiple chronic diseases.

It's the rare person that's going to make it to age 90 with no chronic disease.

So you are kind of preparing for those chronic diseases and getting yourself into the best shape and the best fitness for then having to deal with that chronic disease.

So yeah, lots of benefits, I think, to exercising throughout your lifetime, even if it doesn't ultimately prevent you from getting a particular disease.

So most of the research we have has been on the aerobic side of things.

So somebody gets diagnosed with cancer, they do oftentimes go on to these treatments fairly quickly.

So it can be a short window in terms of getting ready.

But prehabilitation is this very important concept that you can prepare for these treatments and potentially reduce your complications, reduce your length of hospital stay, improve your quality of life and your recovery afterwards.

Most of the studies have looked at

fairly simple aerobic programs, walking programs, and oftentimes they're combined with nutrition, psychological counseling, stress reduction.

In the general literature, these programs have been shown to be effective for patients going on to surgery, on to a major surgery, and showing that they have fewer complications from the surgery, shorter hospital stay.

In the cancer area, we haven't demonstrated quite as strong of benefits.

We can show that if you get some exercise before surgery, that you are fitter prior to surgery and that you end up being fitter and able to function better physically after surgery, but not really the reductions in, say, length of hospital stay or the complication rate, which is some of the key outcomes that we're seeing in other surgical endeavors.

Yeah, the muscle mass in cancer is critical.

Cancer can become a wasting disease, this phenomenon called cachexia, where you get muscle wasting, especially once you get advanced or metastatic cancer.

But now there's a lot of research showing that low muscle mass is really the critical thing driving risk of recurrence and death from cancer.