• Posted February 24, 2025

Exercise Helps Colon Cancer Survivors Live Longer

Frequent exercise can help colon cancer survivors live longer, perhaps even outlasting average folks, a new study suggests.

Colon cancer patients who were very physically active had three-year survival rates that were slightly higher than the general population, researchers report in the journal Cancer.

“This new information can help patients with colon cancer understand how factors that they can control -- their physical activity levels -- can have a meaningful impact on their long-term prognosis,” lead researcher Justin Brown, director of the Cancer Metabolism Program with the Pennington Biomedical Research Center at Louisiana State University, said in a news release.

For the study, his team pooled results from two National Cancer Institute-sponsored trials studying people treated for stage 3 colon cancer.

In the trials, nearly 2,900 participants reported their levels of physical activity, which researchers translated into metabolic equivalents, or MET-hours per week. 

Results showed that participants who got 18 or more MET-hours of exercise per week had an overall three-year survival rate 3% higher than the general population.

To put that in perspective, health guidelines recommend 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise each week, which is equal to about 8 MET-hours per week.

“Cancer survivors who were tumor-free by year three and regularly exercised achieved even better subsequent survival rates than those seen in the matched general population,” researchers noted in a news release.

Examples of moderate-intensity exercise include walking briskly, recreational swimming, bicycling slower than 10 miles per hour, active yoga, ballroom dancing, or general yard work or home repair, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

On the other hand, colon cancer survivors who got fewer than 3 MET-hours per week of physical activity had an overall survival rate 3% lower than the general population, according to the pooled data.

Data broken out from the individual clinical trials showed even lower survival rates for people with less than 3 MET-hours of weekly exercise -- 17%  over the first three years and 11% lower than the general population in the subsequent three years.

“Medical and public health personnel and policymakers are always seeking new ways to communicate the benefits of a healthy lifestyle,” Brown said.

“Quantifying how physical activity may enable a patient with colon cancer to have a survival experience that approximates their friends and family without cancer could be a simple but powerful piece of information that can be leveraged to help everyone understand the health benefits of physical activity,” Brown added.

The findings were reported Feb. 24.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on how to measure physical activity intensity.

SOURCE: American Cancer Society, news release, Feb. 24, 2025