While researching it [colon cancer], I came across a new study showing that exercise extends life for people diagnosed with that condition.
...researchers recruited 889 patients from 55 different health centers in six countries. All had undergone surgery and chemotherapy between 2009 and 2024; half were randomized into a three-year partly supervised exercise program. Those who got the exercise program were 37 percent less likely to die during the study’s follow-up period and 28 percent less likely to have a recurrence of colon or other cancer.
For the first year, the patients had supervised exercise and “behavioral support” sessions with their exercise coaches every two weeks. For the second and third years, it was once a month. They were free to choose any form of aerobic exercise they wanted, with the goal of increasing their weekly activity by about 10 MET-hours per week, which corresponds to about 2.5 hours of brisk walking. Most of the participants ended up choosing walking as their activity of choice.
All of this makes a convincing case that exercise should be an important treatment option available to cancer patients. As Booth and his colleagues point out, the magnitude of the benefit seen here is comparable to what you get from new cancer drugs that cost $100,000 to $200,000 per year. The exercise program provided in the study, in contrast, typically costs around $3,000 for the entire three-year period.
FTA: