Exercise as Medicine for Breast Cancer

The trade journal of Sports Medicine Australia is called Sport Health. In their most recent issue (Volume 30, Issue 4, 2012/2013), they ran an article written by Dr. Hamish Osborne entitled "Breast cancer treatment needs a lesson in exercise." In this article, Dr Osborne argues that physical activity may be more effective than pharmaceutical treatments to prevent an initial diagnosis or recurrence of breast cancer. He calls for a new study to compare physical activity against traditional medicine to see which is actually more effective at treating breast cancer. He has some really good passages, so rather than bumble through a summary, I'm just going to give you some of the most important excerpts from his piece.

"Tamoxifen in this group has been shown to significantly increase other potentially life-threatening conditions. A study has shown endometrial cancer rates increase by 250 per cent, pulmonary embolus rates by 260 per cent and stroke rates by 40 per cent. So if the rates of these conditions are summed up comparing Tamoxifen versus control there is only a 0.6 per cent reduction in life-threatening conditions in women taking Tamoxifen to prevent breast cancer."

"The $560 million it would cost to treat 80 per cent of these women for one year [to treat 1.25 million women with Tamoxifen] would also pay for 3.3 million sedentary women to be provided with guided exercise prescription."

"For each life saved due to Herceptin 1 in every 25 women treated (whether they respond or not) die of heart disease caused by the drug."

"The estimated annual budget with Australia for Herceptin is $105,000,000 (i.e. 21,000 patients) - or in other terms 600,000 sedentary Australian women provided with exercise prescription."

"So this shows we have two hugely expensive anti breast cancer drugs, the benefits of which need to be reviewed in relation to physical activity levels to consider whether the benefits are real."

"Should the government continue to pay millions of dollars for drugs when they don't pay the same amount to support physical activity intervention in the same groups, for at least the same improved disease outcome, not accounting for the added side effect of reduced all cause mortality?"