Lifestyle modifications for patients with breast cancer to improve prognosis and optimise overall health.
http://www.cmaj.ca/content/189/7/E268Here is the link link to the article. Regarding exercise here is my summary of the main points:
Exercise and maintaining be your ideal body weight are the most important lifestyle interventions of you want to decrease your risk of cancer recurrence and death.
Physical activity ( 150 minutes /week moderate intensity ) can reduce the chance of death from BC by up to 40%. This is reported as a Hazard Ratio.
Two large analysis showed an inverse dose response curve effect between hours of exercise per week and breast cancer mortality. This holds if you exercise after diagnosis - it is independent of pre diagnosis levels of exercise.
Similar beneficial metabolic effects have been shown for both aerobic and resistance exercise but optimal results are achieved with a combination of the two.
The American Cancer Society website has a consensus on optimal exercise for a cancer patient.
It appears that more is required of BC survivors.
There are several postulated mechanisms for this but the most interesting to me is that it appears that exercise changes epigenetics. Briefly exercise changes expression of genes ( phenotype) without changing the underlining DNA (genotype)
