"Muscles can protect against cancer"

Christiane Fux studied journalism and psychology in Hamburg. The experienced medical editor has been writing magazine articles, news and factual texts on all conceivable health topics since 2001. In addition to her work for, Christiane Fux is also active in prose. Her first crime novel was published in 2012, and she also writes, designs and publishes her own crime plays.

More posts by Christiane Fux All content is checked by medical journalists.

Exercise protects against cancer - but how? The sports scientist Dr. Freerk Baumann provides a surprising answer to this.

Dr. Freerk Baumann

Dr. Freerk Baumann is a sports scientist at the Institute for Cardiovascular Research and Sports Medicine at the German Sport University Cologne. His main research area is the topic of "exercise, sport and cancer". For setting up his hiking projects with cancer patients, he was awarded the Helmut Wölte Prize for Psycho-Oncology 2009 and the Pulsus Health Prize 2010 for the "Campaign of the Year".

Dr. Baumann, in the past it was always said: "Cancer patients should take it easy". That has meanwhile been deviated from.

Absolutely. A real paradigm shift has taken place. We have now been able to show that exercise has a number of positive effects on cancer patients. For example, it helps against fatigue syndrome, the extreme exhaustion from which many cancer patients suffer. But also with tumor cachexia, in which cancer patients become incredibly thin and lose their muscles. Exercise can also have a positive effect on men who can no longer hold their urine after prostate cancer surgery. And it helps patients with anxiety and depression, which often arise as a result of their severe cancer.

But sport should be able to do even more, namely prevent cancer.

For certain cancers, it has been shown that exercise reduces the likelihood of this. These include breast cancer, colon cancer, and a certain form of uterine cancer. For other types of cancer, there is strong evidence that exercise reduces the risk of the disease. Exercise can possibly also protect against relapses - but we don't know for sure yet.

How can you imagine that? What exactly happens in the body when we do sport?

Honestly? We do not know that, yet. But of course we have a number of hypotheses.

For example?

We are currently investigating whether exercise blocks free radicals in the body. These are aggressive oxygen molecules that are created excessively during stress or poor nutrition, for example. They can damage the genetic make-up.

And for a few years now we have known that we can activate certain genes through our lifestyle, but also suppress them. Also through sport. Physical activity may have a positive impact on those gene segments that are associated with cancer.

Does the influence that sport has on the immune system also help?

This can of course also contribute to the anti-cancer effect. But there is another very exciting hypothesis:

Right now I have a new, as yet unpublished study on the table. It shows that cancer patients who did strength training survived more often than patients who mostly did other physical exercise - for example in the form of endurance training. Of course, we ask ourselves why that is.You also have a general immune stabilization with endurance training.

That's exciting - do you already have a hypothesis?

We believe that muscles play an unimagined role in cancer prevention. For several years we have known that a muscle not only has the task of holding our bones together and moving them, but that muscles also produce the body's own messenger substances when they are active, so-called myokines. They have an amazing effect in the body: Among other things, they influence our hormonal system and our metabolism, especially the sugar metabolism.

And that has an impact on cancer?

Exactly. This is proven by the connection between cancer and diabetes. We know that type 2 diabetes per se is a risk factor for at least twenty-seven different types of cancer - especially those that affect the digestive organs. Type 2 diabetics, for example, have a six to seven times higher risk of developing colon cancer, pancreatic cancer or gastric cancer.

At least I am convinced that the muscles have a major influence on the risk of cancer. That would also explain why strength training has a greater effect on the life expectancy of cancer patients than endurance sports.

So should cancer patients hang up their jogging shoes and rather lift dumbbells?

Certainly not! There is still a lot we have to find out before we can make such a statement. Which sports in which duration and frequency and in which mixture are optimal? There is still a lot of research to be done. But I am already assuming that not all movement is the same.

Tags:  symptoms alternative medicine medicinal herbal home remedies