Exercise good for people undergoing chemotherapy

Exercise has multiple benefits and researchers suggest that exercise may have an added benefit for cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy.

Their work, performed on a melanoma mouse model, found that combining exercise with chemotherapy shrunk tumours more than chemotherapy alone.

"The immediate concern for patients is the cancer but then when you get over that hump, you have to deal with the long-term elevated risk of cardio-vascular disease," said Joseph Libonati, an associate professor with University of Pennsylvania.

Exercise has long been recommended to cancer patients for its physical and psychological benefits.

Libonati and colleagues were interested in testing whether exercise could protect against the negative cardiac-related side effects of the common cancer drug Doxorubicin.

Though effective at treating a variety of types of cancer, Doxorubicin has is known to damage heart cells which could lead to heart failure in the long-term.

In lab settings, mice were given an injection of melanoma cells in the scruffs of their necks.

During the next two weeks, two of the groups received Doxorubicin in two doses while the other two groups received placebo injections.

Mice in one of the treated groups and one of the placebo groups were put on exercise regimens while the rest of the mice remained sedentary.

The results found that the mice that both received chemotherapy and exercised had significantly smaller tumours after two weeks than mice that only received Doxorubicin.

"If exercise helps in this way, you could potentially use a smaller dose of the drug and get fewer side effects," Libonati noted.

The paper appeared in the American Journal of Physiology.