Exercise may lead to faster prostate tumour growth

It is known that doing regular exercise can enhance health. Yet, a new study has claimed that it may also speed up the growth of prostate tumour.

It is known that doing regular exercise can enhance health. Yet, a new study has claimed that it may also speed up the growth of prostate tumour.

A team of researchers from the Duke Comprehensive Cancer Centre and the Duke Prostate Centre in the US has found that exercise could increase blood flow to prostate tumours, thereby triggering their faster growth.

According to the study’s lead author Lee Jones, “Our study showed that exercise led to significantly greater tumour growth than a more sedentary lifestyle did.” In their study on mice, the researchers implanted prostate tumours subcutaneously in the flanks of 50 rodents and then put half of them in cages with exercise wheels and half in cages with no wheels.

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All the mice were fed the same diet. On average, the exercising mice ran more than half-a-mile each day. “We found that among the mice that had the opportunity to voluntarily exercise, tumours grew approximately twice as fast as they did among the mice that did not exercise,” the ScienceDaily quoted Jones as saying.

Scientists know that a challenge in delivering chemotherapy and radiation to tumours can be their poor blood flow, “so these findings may hint at a way in which to improve blood flow to tumours, perhaps then allowing for better distribution of medicine,” Jones said.