Cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) is a strong predictor of cardiovascular disease and mortality, yet its relationship with cancer incidence is unclear. In this video, , a medical oncologist at Johns Hopkins University, discusses assessing the relationship between CRF and lung and colon cancer.
Following is a transcript of her remarks:
There have been a number of studies looking at cardiac fitness in terms of cancer mortality, and those studies have shown that people who have better fitness, so high fitness levels, have less mortality from cancer, so they're not dying from cancer as often. There have not been many studies looking at the incidence of cancer, so does it affect really your ability to get cancer or does it influence at all? What our study looked at was specifically for lung and colorectal cancer, and we found that those people who have really high fitness have much lower incidence of colon and lung cancer.
Our study was based on, actually, a clinically referred population, so it's people who are going to the doctor and the fitness level was assessed by cardiac stress testing or exercise stress testing on a treadmill. A lot of people will already have this information and how it's being used currently is to inform your risk of cardiovascular disease. But based on our results, we think that it could also be important for cancer prevention and also can tell you if you're at higher risk or lower risk of lung and colon cancer based on the results of that test. Now what we don't know is whether or not changing fitness -- so if you're in the low fitness category -- if you change that, we don't know how that impacts cancer yet.
The other things that we'll be looking at is the impact that it has on other cancers, so not just lung and colon cancer, but other cancers as well. Then one of the things that we need to do, I think sort of as a society, is see how you can change fitness and how that impacts your cancer incidence.