How is it that chronic inflammation can cause cell damage that leads to cancer, but exercise (which can also cause inflammation, such as in weight lifting) lowers cancer risk? Are certain types of exercise less inflammatory and thus better for lowering risk factors that lead to cancer?

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How is it that chronic inflammation can cause cell damage that leads to cancer, but exercise (which can also cause inflammation, such as in weight lifting) lowers cancer risk? Are certain types of exercise less inflammatory and thus better for lowering risk factors that lead to cancer?

In: Biology

Anonymous 0 Comments

PhD molecular medicine here. Exercise causes inflammation but it isn’t chronic, it’s brief and stimulates what’s called a “physiological” response, meaning it’s adaptive in a favourable way. The opposite to this is a “pathological” response which is the case with chronic inflammation which means those effects are going to be problematic for your body inducing negative changes to your system.

I imagine there may be a relationship between different types of exercise and the degree of inflammation they induce though how well this can then be tied to its ability to attenuate cancer is quite difficult to determine as exercise induces such a broad spectrum of changes to a human’s system.

What I mean is it would be difficult to establish this relationship in humans.

I don’t know the oncology literature, my background is heart disease, but I imagine there is plenty of it looking at the relationship between physical activity and cancer rates which you should be able to find easily enough.

There may be a relationship between exercise and cancer but whether that’s controlled either directly or partially by inflammation may not be known.

Anyone else have some answers?