The results come from the CO21 Challenge trial of exercise coaching in people who had recently had surgery and a course of chemotherapy for an early-stage colon tumour.
After eight years, 10 per cent of those in the exercise programme had died from their cancer, compared with 17 per cent in a control group.
“This indicates that exercise has a similarly strong effect as previously shown for chemotherapy, which is really quite impressive,” said Dr Marco Gerlinger, a medical oncologist at Barts Cancer Institute in London, who was not involved in the study.
Alternatively they could do more vigorous exercise, like running, for fewer hours per week. People were encouraged to maintain or increase this level of exercise for a further 2.5 years.
Immune system boost
It is unclear exactly why exercise has such a benefit, but it could boost the immune system, helping it to kill cancer cells, or it could reduce levels of inflammatory chemicals that fuel growth of tumours, said the researchers.
The trial involved nearly 900 people from six countries, including the UK. Beforehand, participants had been doing less than 2.5 hours a week of moderate exercise, but they had to be able to walk for 6 minutes at a casual pace to join the trial.
Brisk walking counts as moderate-level aerobic activity (Photo: Betsie Van der Meer/Getty Images/Digital Vision)Several previous studies had suggested that people with cancer had higher survival rates if they were physically active but their results could have been biased by the fact that people with more aggressive tumours might have been too sick to exercise.
“The results allow us to quantify the magnitude of benefit in reducing both risk of cancer recurrence and development of new cancers,” said Professor Coyle. “This magnitude of benefit is comparable to that seen with drug treatments used in routine cancer care.”
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Read More“I think that support from their doctor and a physiotherapist or trainer will almost certainly be necessary to make this effective for the majority of patients.”
“From there I started going to classes at the gym and now I do weight training twice a week, pole walking, and I’m in a walking group. Once I was shown how to use the machines and do the exercises, I loved it.”
The work was published in the medical journal, The New England Journal of Medicine.
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