Physical Therapy Can Prevent Colon Cancer?

TLDR:

• This study looked at whether a 3-year exercise program helped patients with colon cancer who had already finished chemotherapy. They compared this to a group who only received health education materials.

• The results showed that the patients who exercised had a significantly longer time without the disease coming back. There was also evidence that they lived longer overall. Exercise prescription and patient education as a major component of PT practice.

• The main side effect for the exercise group was more muscle and bone-related problems, which may require more physical therapy management.
  
  

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Transcript:

Hey y'all, Dr. Wells here today. I'm in my vertical garden here checking out my longevity spinach because we're talking about colon cancer today. That's right, so one thing that we know a lot about with colon cancer is dietary patterns are a big deal, right? Prevention is key, scanning is key, but I think the most important thing that we don't realize as physical therapists is we can have an impact on our patient outcomes as well.

And this new study in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2025 in July, I think we'll try to change our opinions a little bit. So the study was called Structured Exercise After Adjuvant Chemotherapy for Colon Cancer. Long list of authors, but it's a study out of Canada and Sydney, Australia.

It's a phase three trial and what they did is 55 different sites got together and basically took patients, 889 of them, this is after they had resection of their colon cancer after chemotherapy and said one group is going to do an exercise program and another group is going to have health education. So they're going to talk to them about healthy eating habits, healthy living styles, et cetera. Well, we're going to just follow up with you in about almost eight years.

And what they did is after that follow-up, they found 28% reduction in recurrence of colon cancer primary cancers or death in the exercise group versus the controlled group. What's even cooler about this study is that the control group, even after their cancer diagnosis, because they got education, actually increased their exercise too. So the overall differences in the amount of exercise was equivalent to about six METs per hour or sorry, six MET hours, if you will.

So a difference of that would be like, I don't know, roughly an hour of tennis or maybe 45 minutes of jogging or an extra like two hours of slow walking per week. So while you may say, well, extra two hours of walking per week is a lot, Sean, well, consider that, you know, divided over several days and things. It's really not that much, but in any event, um, what's really cool is how overall the exercise had an impact.

And we as physical therapists tend to kind of forget that exercise has that impact on our immune system, which can help things like cancer. So, uh, whether you're an inpatient, acute care generalist, physical therapist, this is why we need to be talking about exercise for prevention, as well as, uh, you'll follow up after things like cancer treatment. So anyhow, if you like this content, definitely like subscribe, uh, check out our, our, uh, board approved, continue education courses at nutritionalphysicaltherapy.com and have a great day.