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18.04.2024

Vigorous exercise is a cancer drug - in the right dose

Exercise is a non-medical additional treatment for cancer that should not be underestimated. But high-intensity exercise may be something you need to dose carefully. Too much seems to be counterproductive, a Chinese animal study suggests.

Study
In 2016, Chinese oncologists affiliated with Fudan University published an animal study in Oncogene in which they injected mice with cancer cells. Then they divided the mice into 4 groups.

The first group served as a control group and received no additional treatment. The researchers had the mice in the second, third and fourth groups swim for 8, 16 and 24 minutes, respectively, every day. The experiment lasted 6 weeks.

Mice hate swimming. For mice, swimming is a source of extreme stress. The swimming sessions in this experiment cannot be compared to a run or a visit to a fitness center.

Results
In the mice that had to swim for 8 minutes every day, the tumors grew less quickly than in the control group. In the 8 minutes group, there was also less metastasis while the mice lived longer.

In the mice that swam 16 or 24 minutes a day, cancer progression did not slow.

Click on the figures below for a larger version.

The researchers found a significant increase in dopamine in the blood and in the tumors of the mice that had exercised for 8 minutes a day. Because they wondered whether dopamine could help slow the disease, they did another series of animal experiments.

The researchers injected mice with cancer cells and then administered bromocriptine to some of the mice. Bromocriptine can interact with receptors for dopamine in cells. The figures below show that bromocriptine reduced the growth of the tumors.

Conclusion
You cannot conclude from the Chinese animal study that 8 minutes of intensive training per day improves the prospects for cancer and more intensive training does not. In the Chinese experimental design, mice do not resemble humans enough for this. But the study does make it plausible that when it comes to intensive training for cancer, there is such a thing as an optimal amount - and also such a thing as too much.

The situation is probably different for moderate-intensity or light physical exertion. In that regard, as far as we know, there is no such thing as 'too much'.

Source:
Oncogene. 2016 Aug 4;35(31):4122-31.

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