LifeCare Chiropractic

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prostate cancer recurrence

Prostate Cancer Survival and Exercise: How Much is Enough?

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exercise and prostate cancer
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It goes without saying that preventing prostate cancer in the first place is the better idea. But there are clearly times when the cat is out of the bag and you need to do whatever you can to increase your odds of prostate cancer survival.

Increasing your odds of surviving prostate cancer as well as avoiding prostate cancer recurrence are a topics I have written about in previous blog posts.  Some simple tips can include:

  1. Checking specific hormones to tell if you are at risk of your cancer becoming aggressive.
  2. Making sure you are living an anti-diabetic lifestyle, since this greatly contributes to the likelihood of prostate cancer coming back.
  3. Cutting all dairy out of your life since it has been linked time and time again to prostate cancer.
  4. Androgen deprivation therapy has been shown to worsen your outcome.

This particular article adds another tool to your list of ways to make sure that you don’t become another prostate cancer statistic.  And, given just how important #2 is above when it comes to preventing ANY chronic disease, it should come as no surprise what tool was able to drastically increase prostate cancer survival.

Exercise.  Big shocker there.

But what this study looked into in more detail was just how much exercise was able to make a difference.  Overall, they looked at 4,623 men who had been diagnosed with localized prostate cancer and followed up with them to find out how much exercise had an impact on their overall survival.  Recreational exercise was measured in MET-h/day, or the number of exercise hours in a day.  As an example, one MET-h/day is about the equivalent of sitting on your duff.

With that in mind, here’s what they found:

  • Men who engaged in at least 5 recreational MET-h/d were 37% less likely to die of any cause.
  • Walking/bicycling more than 20 min/day led to a 30% lower risk of dying.
  • Performing household work for more than an hour/day led to a 29% lower risk.
  • Exercising for at least an hour per week led to a 26% lower risk.
  • When the cause of death was narrowed to prostate cancer related deaths, those men who walked/bicycled more than 20 min/day had a respectable 39% lower risk of dying from prostate cancer, while those who were exercising at least an hour per week had a 32% lower risk.

Either way you look at it, exercise saved the day.  But what was really surprising was just how little exercise it took.  One hour per week.

That’s like 8.57 minutes per day to greatly increase your chance of survival.

But let’s change the perspective on this.  You’ve been diagnosed with prostate cancer and your life potentially hangs in the balance of the choices you make.  If you are looking at the 8.57 minutes per day thinking that you MIGHT be able to pull that off, you’ve got the wrong attitude.

If you can’t dedicate yourself to exercise (you can pull off a good strength-training routine and aerobic routine in 45 minutes 3 times per week) to save your life, and would instead rather resort to hope and the best medicine has to offer, then you should just hang it up now and go back to sitting on the couch.

 

Stopping Prostate Cancer Recurrence: How to Completely Miss the Boat

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Having prostate cancer at all is a bad thing, but living with the constant fear of prostate cancer recurrence can be worse.

There is no shortage of controversy over our fascination with overdiagnosis of both prostate cancer and breast cancer in medicine today.  I have covered this in a previous blog article (that can be read by clicking here) so I won’t go into it the controversy in detail here.

There is also no shortage of lifestyle factors that clearly, strongly play a role in the development of prostate cancer.  Dairy intake increases the risk of prostate cancer.  Exercise decreases it.  Smoking increases risk.  A plant-based diet decreases risk.

But there is one thing that absolutely plays a role in the development of most types of cancers, with prostate cancer being no exception.

The diabetic spectrum.  Whether we are talking about full-blown diabetes or somewhere along the prediabetic pathway, this absolutely, positively increases your risk of developing prostate cancer.

One of the hallmarks of being prediabetic is abnormalities of lipids like total cholesterol, HDL and LDL cholesterol, VLDL and triglycerides.  Lipids are the first thing I like to look at on a patient’s blood work to see if prediabetes is a concern.

It would then make sense that one of the best ways to lower your risk of developing prostate cancer in the first place would be to live an anti-diabetic lifestyle (again—out of the scope of this article, but you can purchase my eBook on diabetes by clicking here).

But what about prediabetes and prostate cancer recurrence?

This is not exactly what researchers called it in this particular article, but that is essentially what they were looking at.  They looked at the relationship between lipids abnormalities and the risk of prostate cancer recurrence in 843 radical prostatectomy.

Here’s what they found:

  • Elevated triglycerides were associated with a 3% increased risk of prostate cancer recurrence FOR EVERY 10 mg/dl increase.  This can add up fast.
  • Total cholesterol, LDL and HDL did not affect prostate cancer recurrence risk.
  • However, if the men were prediabetic with lipid problems, each 10 mg/dl increase in cholesterol up recurrence risk 9% while the same increase in HDL lowered risk a respectable 39%.

Seems to be in line with expectations.  Lipid problems that indicated prediabetes clearly increased the risk of recurrence.  But it was after this point in the article abstract that I found myself smacking my forehead against the computer monitor…

The authors concluded that these findings suggest that lipid levels should be explored as a modifiable risk factor for prostate cancer recurrence.  In other words, we should use statins to lower the risk of prostate cancer recurrence.

Huh?

Rather than suggesting that an anti-diabetic lifestyle would be powerful for preventing prostate cancer recurrence, they just completely skirt the prediabetic / lifestyle issue and jump right to using medications to treat the surrogate end marker and hope for the best.

UGH!!