Exercise Reduces Sex Hormone Levels!

From the first moment my wife discovered she had breast cancer, there was a deafening silence from the men I know. Even ones whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer seemed to have received a gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did little more than mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I started this blog…

Doctors harp on exercise.

Despite the harping – or in my case, perversely because of it – I avoid exercise like the plague.

Even so, as I read more and more sites promoting the “exercise makes you better if you have breast cancer” meme, I found that almost none of them give any kind of evidence as to WHY exercise fights cancer and promotes healing.

So I dug into the sites and finally found some evidence supporting this wild, “Do this one weird thing…” kind of meme. This week, it’s number

3) Physical activity may decrease risk for various cancers by several mechanisms, including decreasing sex hormones

My first reaction to this was, “Huh????”

On second examination and with a little reading, it’s become more obvious.

Most of us know that “Many breast cancers are sensitive to the hormone estrogen. This means that estrogen causes the breast cancer tumor to grow. Such cancers have estrogen receptors on the surface of their cells. They are called estrogen receptor-positive cancer or ER-positive cancer.”

My wife has to take a five year regimen of anastrazole pills that block estrogen uptake by healthy cells. I wrote about that here: http://breastcancerreaper.blogspot.com/2011/12/next-five-years-anastrazole-whats-it-do.html

But are there OTHER sex hormones that affect the growth of breast cancer tumors and can be lowered with exercise? “Exercise affects hormone production in both females and males. According to the December 2009 issue of "Sports Medicine," exercise suppresses production of luteinizing hormone (LH), follicle stimulating hormone (FSH) and hormones produced by the ovaries. A study published in the June 2010 issue of "Journal of Sports Science and Medicine" indicates physical activity inhibits production of sex steroid hormones including estrogen.”

According to recent research, “...LH[RH] agonists [a chemical that binds to a receptor of a cell and triggers a response by that cell...often mimic the action of a naturally occurring substance.]...suppress ovarian function and sex steroid production; the reduction in sex steroids is predicted to lead to the prevention of breast cancer... Ovarian hormones (estrogens and progestogens) are critical factors in the genesis of human breast cancer. During the premenopausal years breast cancer risk increases steeply, but after menopause it increases at a much lower rate. Epidemiologic studies have clearly demonstrated that early menopause...substantially reduces breast cancer risk.”

I covered the effects of estrogen both in the essay linked above and in the first one of this series. What effect does LH and FSH and “hormones produced by the ovaries” have on breast cancer? In a recent study, researchers found that: “the more potent hydroxylated tamoxifen metabolite 4OHNDtam (endoxifen) was the only tamoxifen metabolite positively associated with FSH levels suggesting anti-estrogenic effect on the pituitary. This may explain the observed positive association between a better prognosis and FSH levels during tamoxifen therapy.”

All of this means...WHAT????

Exercise suppresses the production of LH, FSH and “other ovarian hormones” like estrogen and progestogens. At MUCH lower levels, exercise can mimic the effect of the anti-cancer drug, tamoxifen. It does NOT mean “QUIT ALL DRUGS, EXERCISE WILL CURE BREAST CANCER!”!!!!!!! It DOES NOT MEAN “Quit all dugs, exercise will cure breast cancer!”

There IS no miraculous, take-a-pill, jump-on-a-treadmill, move-to-Arizona-and-soak-up-sun cure for breast cancer.

It’s hard. It’s ugly.

A breast cancer survivor needs all the help she can get. Exercise helps.

So, just do it!

References: http://www.livestrong.com/article/476775-hormonal-imbalances-exercise/#ixzz1qhGvuOID
, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC138786/

Image: http://experiencepilates.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/bc-exercise-for-health.jpg

A Walk From The Park; A Walk From The Diagnosis...

From the first moment my wife discovered she had breast cancer, there was a deafening silence from the men I know. Even ones whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer seemed to have received a gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did little more than mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I started this blog…(Sorry this is late today, but my new granddaughter was born on Thursday and we just moved the newly expanded family home this afternoon!)

As I noted in the previous post, I was late putting this up because we hosted the grandchildren for a night in order to give my son and daughter-in-law a night without those very same kidlings!

The oldest is Noah, who at 19 months is both a wonder and a joy.

Today, he also caused me to ponder my life after my wife’s breast cancer diagnosis.

It’s very close to 365 days since she got the news that the biopsy showed cancer in both the ducts and the nodes, so cancer is much on my mind lately. Alternately, I forget that it ever happened.

That’s why Noah gave me an insight today. I put him in the red and blue plastic wagon we got specifically to tote him around in our neighborhood. We set off for the park at the end of the street and after we arrived and he refused to go down the slide more than once and seemed terrified of being in the swing; we got ready to go home.

That was when he decided he was going to push the wagon.

At first I figured that was fine. He’d lose interest and I’d pop him back in and we nip on home for a cookie and a glass of water. But he didn’t lose interest. Despite running the wagon smack into sticks, curbs, sandbags, the edges of the sidewalk and bumps in the road, he kept going.

Now let me point out that a 19 month old’s stride is about the length of my FOOT. Where it takes ten minutes for me to walk to the park in a few hundred strides.

I’m sure I don’t have to give you the stopwatch numbers for you to imagine how long it took us to get back home. Oh, and we had to stop along the way and pick up a couple of interesting rocks, some sticks and a couple hundred seed pods from some nearby overhanging tree. The seed pods were scooped including mud and pebbles as well as the pods and artfully deposited in the boot of the wagon.

Once home and doing some thinking to prepare for this week’s post, the trip from the park abruptly illuminated my personal trip from that original cancer diagnosis to today. Lest you think this places me in the spotlight to show me doing something wonderful, let me pop that notion with a red hot needle.

I’m not Noah on that journey.

I am, (SURPRISE!) me.

Unlike Noah, I was not patient and interested in everything around me. Unlike Noah, I was not open to the possibilities of the JOURNEY. Unlike Noah, I did not find joy in the things along the trail. I didn’t marvel at the sticks, I didn’t find unexpected, absorbing beauty in simple things laying in my path. I just worried about getting THERE.

How much did I miss? Would I have found someone who would have broken the “deafening silence from the men I know. Even ones whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer seemed to have received a gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did little more than mumble about the experience”, or would I have actually met people along the way who would have changed my experience? I’ll never know because I was too busy rushing to the end.

I just wanted to get from the park home immediately.

So if you’re rushing along in a hurry to get home, may I suggest taking a few moments to scoop up some of those red seeds laying on the sidewalk?

Image: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEc4slBKg4jHnjTlQ7-Thrj6IbCI7psxrNCvVI12bczyywyjnMMiHfkPb9AeTr4nMgXDXVOcHLb2Bh8i5g1Xzt_J70f7uMVd6KjXTZWOuXsM8wK6e73mGETpq5oS0hEffVRranhoQSGOM/s320/don't_litter.JPG

Post delay! Grandkids in the house!

Our grandchildren --Noah (1 1/2 years) and Natalie (6 weeks) -- were over for the night...*whew!* I don't know how my son and DIL do it! (I guess that's why we have children when we're YOUNG!). Anyway, the post will be up later!

-- Guy

Exercise Reduces Leptin Levels!

From the first moment my wife discovered she had breast cancer, there was a deafening silence from the men I know. Even ones whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer seemed to have received a gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did little more than mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I started this blog…
Doctors harp on exercise.

Despite the harping – or in my case, perversely because of it – I avoid exercise like the plague.

Even so, as I read more and more sites promoting the “exercise makes you better if you have breast cancer” meme, I found that almost none of them give any kind of evidence as to WHY exercise fights cancer and promotes healing.

So I dug into the sites and finally found some evidence supporting this wild, “Do this one weird thing…” kind of meme. This week, it’s number

2) A home-based physical activity program had a beneficial effect on the fitness and psychological well-being of previously sedentary women who had completed treatment for early-stage through stage II breast cancer. Increasing physical activity may influence insulin and leptin levels and influence breast cancer prognosis.

As “psychological well-being” isn’t really something scientists can QUANTIFY (quantify means to put numbers to something, as in measuring the HbA1c levels in the blood of a diabetic) and while they can QUALIFY it (“I feel so much more alive when I exercise!”) and it’s a perfectly valid measure of health, I’m going to skip over it in this analysis because different things make different people happy on different days.

I looked at how exercising can have a profound impact on insulin and insulin-like hormone last week, so we’ve been there already.

But what are “leptin levels” and why do they matter in breast cancer – and should they be going up or down?
Leptin is a hormone, like insulin, but it is made in the white fat tissue of a human body rather than in the pancreas. The amount of leptin in the blood is proportional to how much body fat a person has. Like all hormones, leptin has a purpose in the body. It travels to the brain where it finds its place in receptors in brain neurons where it is involved in regulating energy intake and expenditure.

What’s important HERE is that leptin controls food intake and energy expenditure. But what does that have to do with breast cancer?

According to some fairly technical abstracts I read (I have a BS in biology and I’ve been teaching, reading and going to conferences for 31 years; I can read “scientese”) leptin causes its target cells to have more receptors to particular hormones (for those of you who want to check it out, Google “leptin upregulation”). In this case, estrogen – and it is estrogen that initiates and continues the growth of breast cancer cells. That’s why after chemotherapy my wife has to continue to take estrogen-suppression tablets for five years.

Exercise then, apparently affects the levels of leptin – but it AIN’T a magic bullet, folks, so don’t go asking your doctor for leptin injections! The reason that leptin levels go down with exercise is because you LOSE WEIGHT and FAT! The fat cells are where the leptin is manufactured, therefore, when you bomb the factories with walking, eating sensible amounts and kinds of food, using your elliptical machine, parking farther out in a parking lot and walking in and taking the Pup for a quick walk to the park; you reduce the amount of leptin in your blood because you have fewer fat cells to make it!

So WALK people!

Original Essay: http://breastcancerreaper.blogspot.com/2012/03/exercise-how-freak-is-it-miraculous.html

Image: http://www.rkm.com.au/cell/cellimages/fat-cells-adipocytes.jpg

Exercise Reduces Estrogen In the Blood and Strengthens Insulin In the Blood!

From the first moment my wife discovered she had breast cancer, there was a deafening silence from the men I know. Even ones whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer seemed to have received a gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did little more than mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I started this blog…

Doctors harp on exercise.

Despite the harping – or in my case, perversely because of it – I avoid exercise like the plague.


Even so, as I read more and more sites promoting the “exercise makes you better if you have breast cancer” meme, I found that almost none of them give any kind of evidence as to WHY exercise fights cancer and promotes healing.


So I dug into the sites and finally found some evidence supporting this wild, “Do this one weird thing…” (http://www.fatburningfurnace.com/index.php?hop=zthfitaff&pid=1974) kind of meme.


1) Exercise may prevent tumor development by lowering hormone levels, (particularly in premenopausal women), as well as lowering levels of insulin and insulin-like growth factor



“Tumor development” – tumors are the things that create the ghastly dark shadows on the mammogram. Characterized by being a lump, the tumor is “abnormal breast tissue cells, growing in an uncontrolled way.”


Hormone levels in a human body mean lots of things. When we thing of hormones, we think of estrogen and testosterone, what most people call “sex hormones”. Essentially, hormones are chemicals made by cells and organs that send messages to other parts of the body. Chemicals we are familiar with but don’t usually call hormones are things like calcitonin, glucagon, human chorionic gonadotropin, serotonin, prostaglandin and of course, insulin. Early pregnancy detection kits are made to show the level of human chorionic gonadotropin. If it’s there, there is a 99% chance you are pregnant. It doesn’t EXIST in a woman’s bloodstream unless she is pregnant.


What hormone levels does exercise reduce? Primarily estrogen. Estrogen does things besides produce secondary sexual characteristics and feed breast cancer tumors. It also increases fat stores in the body (important for energy), increases bone formation, increases triglycerides in blood, promotes fluid balances and decreases fat deposition. Exercising to a point of fat loss causes a decrease in the number of cells in women that make estrogen in fat cells (this begins in menopause) , therefore the amount of estrogen in the blood goes down and the cancer cells grow more slowly.


Insulin and insulin-like growth factor from the pancreas and the liver respectively, regulate the uptake of glucose and fats in the body as well as regulating cell growth. With exercise, insulin absorption and effectiveness increases which shows up as less insulin in the bloodstream and doing its job in the body – which is to cause cells in the liver, muscle, and fat tissue to take up glucose from the blood and store it as glycogen rather than allowing it to float around the bloodstream – which is toxic.


To make a long story short: exercise lowers estrogen and makes insulin more effective.


OK – now I’m starting to see it!


References: http://breastcancer.about.com/od/risk/a/lump_overview.htm, http://www.aphroditewomenshealth.com/news/20030123215938_health_news.shtml, http://www.diabeteshealth.com/read/1996/05/01/611/how-does-exercise-affect-insulin-levels/, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_hormones


Image: http://www.fernlifecenter.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/estrogen1.jpg

Exercise -- HOW THE FREAK IS IT A MIRACULOUS CURE FOR CANCER?????

From the first moment my wife discovered she had breast cancer, there was a deafening silence from the men I know. Even ones whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer seemed to have received a gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did little more than mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I started this blog…(Sorry this is late today, but my new granddaughter was born on Thursday and we just moved the newly expanded family home this afternoon!)

I’ve talked about this subject before, but it’s one that doesn’t seem to yield to mere discussion:

http://breastcancerreaper.blogspot.com/2011/05/husbanding-bigger-middle.html

http://breastcancerreaper.blogspot.com/2012/01/10-exercise-hints-for-cancer-folk-and.html

http://breastcancerreaper.blogspot.com/2012/01/guest-post-david-haas-fight-cancer-with.html

As of this moment, I still alternately loathe exercise and acknowledge its importance. Even acknowledging its importance, I rarely do it. And to tell you the truth, I’m completely unsure about the connection between exercise and avoiding or helping cure cancer. So I decided to do some research and was surprised by what I found – or more precisely what I DIDN’T find. I didn’t find a clear explanation of the biological mechanisms connecting exercise and cancer survivorship.

I am ALWAYS leery when “researchers” make broad, sweeping, seemingly miraculous claims about anything – like those constantly irritating little “do this one weird fact” ads promise. In this article, identical statements are made but completely unsupported: “Researchers have established that regular physical activity can improve health by helping to control weight, maintaining healthy bones, muscles, and joints, reducing the risk of developing high blood pressure and diabetes, promoting psychological well-being, and reducing the risk of death from heart disease, reducing the risk of premature death. In addition to these health benefits, researchers are learning that physical activity can also affect the risk of cancer. There is convincing evidence that physical activity is associated with a reduced risk of cancers of the colon and breast. Several studies also have reported links between physical activity and a reduced risk of cancers of the prostate, lung, and lining of the uterus (endometrial cancer). Despite these health benefits, recent studies have shown that more than 50 percent of Americans do not engage in enough regular physical activity...”

There you have it: wild claims of miraculous health benefits and a sad lamentation that half of us are lazy slobs. How helpful! The fact is that beyond the hyperbole fostered by the Nordic Track (and its ilk) INDUSTRY, there are buried some real facts. It took me quite a bit of time to ferret these out and once I was done I realized I’ll be doing an article for EACH of the ten things below. I’ll start next Saturday, so for now, I leave you with these to ponder:

1) Exercise may prevent tumor development by lowering hormone levels, (particularly in premenopausal women), as well as lowering levels of insulin and insulin-like growth factor

2) A home-based physical activity program had a beneficial effect on the fitness and psychological well-being of previously sedentary women who had completed treatment for early-stage through stage II breast cancer. Increasing physical activity may influence insulin and leptin levels and influence breast cancer prognosis.

3) Physical activity may decrease risk for various cancers by several mechanisms, including decreasing sex hormones

4) Physical activity may decrease risk for various cancers by several mechanisms including reducing metabolic hormones and inflammation

5) Physical activity may decrease risk for various cancers by improving immune function

6) Studies in postmenopausal women indicate that physical activity might affect postmenopausal breast cancer and endometrial cancer risk by reducing body fat, thereby lowering circulating levels of estrogens and androgens

7) Insulin resistance, hyperinsulinaemia, hyperglycaemia and type 2 diabetes have been linked to increased risk of breast, colon, pancreas and endometrial cancers. Physical activity improves insulin resistance, reduces hyperinsulinaemia and reduces risk for diabetes, which could explain the link between increased physical activity and reduced risk for these cancers

8) Increased levels of pro-inflammatory factors and decreased levels of anti-inflammatory factors have been linked with increased cancer risk. Physical activity might reduce systemic inflammation alone or in combination with reduction in body weight or composition through reducing inflammatory cytokines in adipose tissue.

9) Physical activity appears to enhance proliferation of lymphocytes, increases the number of natural killer cells and increases lymphokine-activated killer cells activity.

10) “The complicated nature of the physical activity variable, combined with lack of knowledge regarding possible biological mechanisms operating between physical activity and cancer, warrants further studies including controlled clinical randomized trials.”

References: http://www.ux1.eiu.edu/~cfje/5230/cancer-ex-Thune-01.pdf
, http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/prevention/physicalactivity
, http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/545870_2


Image: http://allthingsdepression.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/doctor_and_elderly_patient.jpg