Exercise is medicine for cancer, even in late stages of the disease | Hacker News Reader

Exercise is medicine for cancer, even in late stages of the disease

ecu.edu.au

85 pointshericium11 comments

Is “significantly” a problematic word in science communication, or is it just me?

In layperson terms, I think it means, “kind of a big deal.”

While in scientific terms I think it means “statistically detectable.”

(this is part of my ongoing segment called “Have I been misunderstanding that word for 30 years?”)

Many science words do not mean the same thing as common usage, that’s just the deal when some people need to be extremely precise and other people don’t while using the same language.

Scientific literature is written for a scientific audience, if the reader doesn’t understand something, that’s on them not the language of the writer. There needs to be space for scientific communication without worrying about the politics of who is going to misunderstand it.

The word 'significantly' in this case appears in the lead of a one minute long press release, that isn't scientific literature.

So it is a bit ambiguous and best practice would be to use 'substantial' or similar, because if it is being used to refer to statistical significance and not effect size in the press release it can just be omitted, should be a given that a positive result was significant.

> “Have I been misunderstanding that word for 30 years?”

Yes. Significantly.

The title is misleading. I know young people who had cancer, and who were exercising 10 times more than average person. Use your own judgement while reading.

I don't kow why you are (at the moment) downvoted.

This publication is only PR from a university and as usual what the real scientific publication tells is very different:

- This univ PR seems to tell that even terminal stage patients may benefit from strong exercise: "Importantly, this exercise induced medicine occurs in patients with incurable, advanced cancer".

Nothing in the Nature article tells something remotely close to that.

- The scientific article [0] only tells that serum collected on those patients, when mixed *in vitro" with commercial cancerous cell lines, showed a reduction in cell growth. It's something that can be observed with a variety of means and it is certainly not a breakthrough.

For example with propolis from honey bees [1], or Astralagus [2]. Yet nobody claims that propolis or astralagus cure cancer.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41391-022-00624-4

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36500338/

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36422536/

I think it is generally established that healthier people get cancer at a lower rate than people who don't exercise, this is an established fact.

That said, the article seems to be more about people with incurable, advanced cancer, which is good news for those people.

> the article seems to be more about people with incurable, advanced cancer

No, if you read the scientific publication, no one was treated. It's just a quick and inexpensive in vitro experiment, not even done with multiple commercial cell lines to confirm or refute the results.

Similarly it could have been tested in living organisms (although most findings in mice don't translate to humans).

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41391-022-00624-4

That's fine...it's a start of a look at it, and all cancer treatments start at this stage of research of course. Exercise is already established as being beneficial for advanced cancer patients in managing symptoms (e.g., I've read it randomly but I came across this review in it treating cancer cachexia[0]), and if it leads to treatment, it'd be great.

That said, yes you're right that it's not a in vivo level finding yet.

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03044...

“Medicine for” does not mean “absolute cure”. Exercising more than average doesn’t make you immune to cancer and people who exercise suffering from cancer doesn’t negate the evidence that it helps.

I agree that its misleading to say "medicine", but I don't agree with the message of your second sentence. Forgive me if I'm assuming.

Consider that too much of anything is bad. If I understand correctly cancer has to do with cell reproduction rate.

So you can imagine then, that there could be an optimal rate of cell regeneration for longest life/cancer avoidance. Too low a cell regeneration rate(no exercise) and maybe, too fats a cell regeneration(10 times more exercise) both lead to cancer.

The point I am trying to elaborate is that a piece of information, even if they do not match all the cases they still are "significant".

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