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…That was four years ago – as time passed, people searching for
answers stumbled across my blog and checked out what I had to say. The
following entry appeared in March of 2012.
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.
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
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