ENCORE #139! – Exercise – HOW THE FREAK IS IT A MIRACULOUS CURE FOR CANCER?????

From the first moment my wife discovered she had breast cancer in March of 2011, there was a deafening silence from the men I knew. 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 first appeared in March of 2012.

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: https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5527/10893068965_1d328e8f71_b.jpg

BREAST CANCER RESEARCH RIGHT NOW! #74: Exercise AFTER Surgery and Chemotherapy WILL Help You Live Longer!

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…

Every month, I’ll be highlighting breast cancer research that is going on RIGHT NOW! Harvested from different websites, journals and podcasts, I’ll translate them into understandable English and share them with you. Today: Breast Cancer and Exercise

So once again it rears its ugly head; the word dreaded by more Americans than embraced by Americans; the single most powerful shaking word in Western Civilization: exercise. Body shaming. (Do you know that even when I google “body shaming” it’s all women; when I google “male body shaming”, I STILL get lots of women…apparently fat men are totally OK with themselves; and women still love them…do I detect a slight double standard here? (ESPECIALLY with advertisers…)

At any rate, despite our horror of exercising and the efforts our society expends driving us to avoid it, the science is in [and has been in for ages – I’ve got more than 20 articles on this blog that deal with exercise (there are lots of duplicates as I do ENCORE’S every other week): https://breastcancerreaper.blogspot.com/search?q=exercise&updated-max=2015-01-17T04:52:00-08:00&max-results=20&start=31&by-date=false] – here’s yet another study that indicates that exercise helps fight breast cancer!

The study was quite clear: “Doing the minimum amount of recommended exercise per week — 2.5 hours — both before and after being diagnosed with breast cancer with a high risk of recurrence is linked to better survival and a lower risk of recurrence, according to a study. The research was published online on April 2, 2020, in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Read the abstract of “Physical activity, before, during and after chemotherapy for high-risk breast cancer: relationships with survival” by following the link below in Resources.

Women who followed the national guidelines for how MUCH we should be exercising – two and a half hours or more PER WEEK (really? Let’s break it down: you have a possible 168 each week available to you (2.5 hrs/168 hrs = a bit more than one percent of your hours should be spent exercising.

“BUT I HAVE TO SLEEP!!!!”

OK, let’s say 8 hours a sleep a day per week (“Yeah, right, like I sleep THAT much! I have kids!”) = 112 AWAKE hours. So just need to sneak out a two and a half of those and you can “cut your risk of recurrence BY HALF!!! (55%).

Sneak those two and a half hours of medium effort to work out and you lower your risk of DYING by MORE THAN HALF (68%).

Even if you recuperated AFTER the surgery, chemo, and rehab were done and you started doing something active for two and a half hour A WEEK, you cut your risk of recurrence almost in half (46%) and the risk of outright dying by a bit less than half (43%)

Even if you’ve been a lounge lizard (ladies) or a couch potato (guys) your entire freaking life, doing TWO PERCENT MORE ACTIVITY than you did before your cancer can drop the risk of the cancer growing back or dying before your time.

I could list ways to get more exercise into your life, but anyone reading this can probably do the same thing and come up with better ideas for your geographic and climate area. According to the study, the conclusion is that (in science talk): “Meeting the minimum guidelines for physical activity both before diagnosis and after treatment appears to be associated with statistically significantly reduced hazards of recurrence and mortality among breast cancer patients.”

In plain English: get a move on and live longer!

Resources: https://academic.oup.com/jnci/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jnci/djaa046/5814214?redirectedFrom=fulltext       

Image: https://nichecrossfit.com.au/wp-content/uploads/Breast-cancer-660x274.jpg

ENCORE #138! – Ripples…

From the first moment my wife discovered she had breast cancer in March of 2011, there was a deafening silence from the men I knew. 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 first appeared in September of 2011.

While my daughter doesn’t often blog on her 20: A Journey of Hope, she does on her other site (http://think.o-my-soul.net/). Currently on the right hand side is her twitterfeed regarding a car accident she and I witnessed.

An elderly woman was driving her very nice car south on Washington Ave, parallel to Interstate 94 at about 4:30 PM. I’d picked my daughter up from Augsburg College where she’d just spent eight hours of attending classes in biopsychology and research methods. Traffic was light. We were chatting.

Many people use Washington to skip the heavy traffic feeding on to the interstate directly from the downtown Minneapolis area. They take it for a short jaunt through the fascinating businesses in the old Warehouse District, then enter the ramp at 22^nd by crossing a usually light southbound lane of traffic.

I think she missed the ramp, got on to the next stretch that runs between 26^th and Lowry and then, thinking the ramp was there, simply veered into oncoming traffic, looking for the ramp. She said to another bystander that she thought it was the turn on to Lowry she was making (and the Washington was a one way?). At any rate, what we saw was the woman’s car swerve deliberately into two oncoming cars.

My daughter says we experienced vicarious dissonance, “a type of vicarious discomfort resulting from imagining oneself in the speaker’s position, leading
to efforts to restore consonance”. In other words, we couldn’t believe that the woman was driving that way because we KNEW that that kind of driving couldn’t happen. We KNEW she should be in the northbound lane.

The resulting head-on collisions destroyed both her car and the badly damaged the other two. I was “first on the scene” and called 911, reported what I saw to police officer in charge after the arrival of two squad cars and a fire truck and my daughter and I moved on to home, deeply shaken.

As I drove, I thought about the accident and the effects it would have. Aside from burning itself into my daughter’s mind – she just got her license a bit over a week ago – and my own, the lives of the people in those cars will be irrevocably affected as well. The young Asian man whose older  model car doubtless carries only collision insurance is now car-less and likely will get piddly cash from the insurance company after endless wrangling over whether he caused the accident or not. The woman in the Volkswagen Beetle will experience the same thing, though by the newness of the car, it likely has more insurance.

And the elderly woman? Will she ever drive again? Will lawsuits (most likely formed by lawyerly vultures wishing to sue everyone in sight and retained by the elderly woman’s wealthy friends, cause the blame to fall on everyone but the woman) be brought, fought and bought? Who brought all of them home? Did the go to the hospital or just go home because their insurance doesn’t pay for something as minor as a non-lethal car accident?

Ripples.

What does a car accident on a Thursday afternoon have to do with breast cancer? Those of you who are THERE can easily guess. Those of you who are not, might consider this: the girlfriend of a good college friend of my daughter; has a mother who was just diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer.

Ripples, ripples, ripples…

Image: https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5527/10893068965_1d328e8f71_b.jpg

Encouragement (In Suffering, Pain, and Witnessing Both…) #12: Transfiguring Anger To Hope

The older I get, the more suffering and pain I’ve experienced; and the more of both I stand witness to. From my wife’s (and many, many of our friends and coworkers) battle against breast cancer; to my dad’s (and the parents of many of our friends and coworkers) process as he fades away as this complex disease breaks the connections between more and more memories, I have become not only frustrated with suffering, pain, and having to watch both, I have been witness to the suffering and pain among the students I serve as a school counselor. I have become angry and sometimes paralyzed. This is my attempt to lift myself from the occasional stifling grief that darkens my days…

After the initial terror. After the grief. After the acceptance. After the body pain. After you’ve watched the love of your life  suffer. After you’ve watched you mother suffer.

When you arrive at anger.

What do you do?

Blame is easiest, so it’s first. The trouble is escaping blame. Escaping anger.

At first, you can use the anger to fight the cancer; use the anger to: power your discipline, meet the “chores” of the doctor visits, the hospital stays, the treatment regimen. Channel it for good – join the research, walk the walks, bike the bikes, support others.

“Anger can range from mild irritation or frustration to rage. Some survivors may feel angry about how cancer affected their lives. They might have new physical, financial or emotional challenges. A certain amount of anger is normal. Yet some survivors may need help to get past strong feelings of anger.”

Another response is to unload and ignore others so long as your own needs are met, like this journalist: https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/08/11/the-anger-of-cancer/ Don’t get me wrong, I viscerally understand the need to lash out and straighten everyone out that cancer is horrible and that you’re suffering. But to make the determination that everyone ELSE needs to suffer is irresponsible and unhelpful. It’s incredibly easy to believe that your feelings and attitude are superior to others; those who have no platform to tell the world exactly how superior their position is and who everyone needs to think the same way. Who knows how many people read this column and crashed into hopelessness?

Anger has to be transformed – NOT avoided, not dismissed, not ignored, not flaunted as virtue.

To transform: “transfigure, convert means to change one thing into another; suggests changing from one form, appearance, structure, or type to another; suggests so changing the characteristics as to alter the use or purpose: ‘to convert a barn into a house’.”

We rarely – I venture to say never – use the word transfigure in this 21^st Century, possibly because it became associated with Christianity a Biblical event called the Transfiguration.

Wikipedia says, “The transfiguration of Jesus is a story told in the New Testament when Jesus is transfigured and becomes radiant in glory upon a mountain…”[Ah, yes, “a story”…they might as well have written “a fairytale only ignorant fools believe” – me”] “…the transfiguration is a pivotal moment, and the setting on the mountain…is the point where human nature meets God: the meeting place of the temporal and the eternal, with Jesus himself as the connecting point, acting as the bridge between heaven and earth.”

Anger transfigured creates something good from something bad, reversing a slide into hopelessness. “Nancy Brinker's life was forever changed by her sister's battle against breast cancer. Susan Goodman Komen died at the age of 36. Founded in her memory in 1982, the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation was born from a sister's love and a solemn promise to do something to stop breast cancer from taking more lives…” This organization has had a profound effect on women all over the world.

Another organization that came out of breast cancer and has had a profound, if entirely different effect, on humanity: “Gilda's Club was founded by Joanna Bull, Radner's cancer psychotherapist and co-founded with Radner's widower, Gene Wilder (himself a cancer survivor) and broadcaster Joel Siegel (who died after a long battle with the disease). Joanna Bull started the project with just $10,000 and networked in the New York cancer support community. She became the executive director of the first club opened in New York City in 1995, after a long fundraising campaign that included movie trailers featuring Wilder in theaters around the country who acted as the celebrity spokesman. The organization took its name from Radner's comment that cancer gave her ‘membership to an elite club I'd rather not belong to’…Gilda's Club is famous for its signature red doors meant to symbolize Radner's ‘vibrancy’.”

Personally? I became involved with Relay For Life: “…community-based fundraising event for the American Cancer Society and many other Cancer related institutions, societies and associations. Each year, more than 5,000 Relay For Life events take place in over twenty countries. Events are held in local communities, university campuses and in virtual campaigns. As the American Cancer Society's most successful fundraiser and the organization's signature event, the mission of Relay For Life is to raise funds to improve cancer survival, decrease the incidence of cancer, and improve the quality of life for cancer patients and their caretakers.” (A note: for some reason, someone has reported issues with the Relay for Life Wiki entry, one of which is “relying too much on primary sources” (what should it rely one? The hearsay of the complainer?)…so, what does Wikipedia WANT that would maintain its “encyclopedic tone”? I wish I could add a laughing emoji as Wikipedia is so NON-encyclopedic and IS sensationalistic, editable by anyone and everyone who has an axe to grind and a political/philosophical agenda to promote. While Wiki is sometimes a good place to start research, I know of NO ONE who takes it seriously…)

How do you transfigure anger? Get involved. Support your loved one. ACT, then continue to act and perhaps don’t write essays designed to share your anger rather than your hope.

                                                      

Resources: https://ww5.komen.org/uploadedFiles/_Komen/Content/About_Breast_Cancer/Tools_and_Resources/Fact_Sheets_and_Breast_Self_Awareness_Cards/What's%20Happening%20to%20Me.pdf, https://www.livestrong.org/we-can-help/finishing-treatment/emotions-after-cancer-treatment, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilda%27s_Club, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relay_For_Life

Image: http://www.quoteambition.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/encourage-quotes-destiny.jpg