Rhonda Patrick, Ph.D.

And that is something that can act as a death signal.

So if you think about the shearing forces, right, shearing forces of blood flow, that is friction against these cancer cells that, again, are responding in a way that it's a negative stress to them and they die.

And that's something that's been shown in vitro.

It's something that if you look at people that have circulating tumor cells, if they engage in physical activity, they're less likely to have cancer recurrence or cancer metastasize.

So the circulating tumor cells, why is it so dangerous to have them in circulation?

Well, for one, let's say you already had cancer and you were treated with cancer.

successfully, quote unquote, let's say you got chemo, radiation, maybe surgery, maybe all three of them, right?

And now you're tumor free, whatever.

So you're in remission.

But the problem is, is that currently in the clinic, we're not doing single cell analysis and looking at every single cell and every single organ to make sure there's not even one cancer cell left, right?

Like we're just saying, oh, the tumor, we don't see the tumor, therefore cancer's gone.

What happens is these single cells, they do escape.

And if they get into circulation, maybe they'll travel to another organ like the liver or something.

And it might take a couple of decades, three, four decades, and all of a sudden you're having symptoms and you're like, well, I have liver cancer now, right?

So cancer recurrence happens, maybe it's even in the same organ,

whatever.

The point here is that the circulating tumor cells are really, they play a role in cancer metastasis to other organs, and they play a role in cancer recurrence in people that have already had cancer and perhaps been treated successfully with that cancer.

So the shearing forces are really important here because they do kill the circulating tumor cells.

That is associated with improved

outcomes either in cancer recurrence and mortality.