▎WuXi AppTec content team editor
Whether it is psychological or physical, exercise can bring positive effects, dopamine secreted during exercise can enhance people's positive emotions, and whenever we run or train muscles, the body's metabolic level will be healthier, bringing benefits including improving brain cognition, reducing insulin sensitivity, activating the immune system, etc.
These benefits can effectively reduce the risk of many diseases, especially exercise to fight cancer has always been a direction of concern in the scientific community. According to many papers, regular exercise is associated with a decline in mortality from a variety of cancers, with a key role being the large increase in immune cells during exercise.
Like a study earlier this year in Frontiers in Physiology that found that exercise can mobilize the production of cytotoxic T cells and natural killer (NK) cells, volunteers with lymphoma experienced a rapid increase in the proportion of CD8+ T cells with antitumor activity after 30 minutes of exercise, and gradually decreased their baseline level after exercise.
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Studies believe that this may indicate that immune cells produced during exercise migrate to different tissues after acute mobilization of exercise. Some mouse studies suggest that exercise-induced T cells accumulate into the lungs and bone marrow.
Recently, researchers at the University of Turku in Finland reconfirmed the link between exercise and immune enhancement in breast cancer patients, including 20 breast cancer patients aged between 37 and 73. They were asked to rest and then undergo 10 minutes of cycling, and all received blood samples at rest, at the end of the exercise and 30 minutes after the exercise.
The new study was recently published in Scientific Reports
10 minutes of exercise does not make cancer patients feel too tired, but it will significantly increase the heart rate, and the resistance to pedaling will be adjusted according to the tolerance level of each patient to avoid negative effects.
First of all, the total number of white blood cells and NK cells in all volunteers increased significantly after 10 minutes of vigorous exercise, among which CD19+ B cells and CD8+ T cytotoxic T cells increased significantly. As observed in previous studies, the change was rapid and short-lived, with all immune cell counts returning to baseline levels after 30 minutes of exercise.
"All patients who exercised had an increase in cytotoxic T cells, which are the workhorses involved in destroying cancer cells," said study author Tiia Koivula, Ph.D.
▲10 minutes of exercise can make a variety of immune cells increase rapidly in a short period of time (Image source: Reference [2])
Dr. Koivula pointed out that past studies have proposed that exercise requires 20-120 minutes of moderate to high intensity training, which is somewhat difficult for healthy people, let alone cancer patients. Studies have confirmed that 10 minutes of exercise is effective and more friendly to cancer patients.
In the acceptable range, it may be better to appropriately increase the intensity of 10 minutes of exercise, according to the paper, when the intensity of exercise increases, the patient's heart rate and blood pressure increase significantly, allowing more immune cells to transfer into the bloodstream and enter the circulatory system.
Light or moderate exercise increases the number of immune cells, and increased exercise intensity allows them to move out of the aggregated organs to help fight cancer cells.
Dr. Koivula pointed out that the types of exercise are not limited to cycling in the study, but any type of exercise you like, and the future research team plans to conduct more studies in cancer patients to determine where the immune cells go after exercise.
Resources:
[1] Tiia Koivula et al, Acute exercise mobilizes CD8+ cytotoxic T cells and NK cells in lymphoma patients, Frontiers in Physiology (2023). DOI: 10.3389/fphys.2022.1078512
[3] Exercise can increase the number of immune cells in the bloodstream of cancer patients. Retrieved May 5, 2023 from https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-05-immune-cells-bloodstream-cancer-patients.html