The surge of adrenaline that comes with a high-intensity workout may help reduce tumour growth by moving cancer-killing immune cells towards lung, liver or skin tumours, a new study in mice suggests.
Scientists found that mice who spent time on a running wheel were able to shrink tumours to 50 per cent of the size, compared to their less active counterparts.
"It is known that infiltration of natural killer (NK) immune cells can control and regulate the size of tumours, but nobody had looked at how exercise regulates the system," said senior study author Pernille Hojman, from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.
"In our experiments, we tried to inject our mice with adrenaline to mimic this increase you see during exercise, and when we do that we see that the NK cells are mobilised to the bloodstream, and if there's a tumour present then the NK cells will find the tumour and home to it," Hojman said.
Researchers next used mice depleted of NK cells to show that the increase in number of NK cells at the site of the tumour was directly contributing to the reduction in size.
Even with exercise and a full suite of other immune cells, without the NK cells these mice experienced the normal rate of cancer growth.
Blocking the function of adrenaline also blunted the cancer-killing benefits of the running wheel.
The research group also discovered that an immune signalling molecule called IL-6 was the link between adrenaline-dependent mobilisation of NK cells and tumour infiltration.
It is known that IL-6 is released from muscle tissue during exercise, but Hojman presents evidence that adrenaline specifically hails IL-6 sensitive NK cells and that the IL-6 molecules helped guide the immune cells to the tumours.
"In this study we show that the exercise-induced IL-6 seems to play a role in homing of NK cells to the tumour and also in the activation of those NK cells," Hojman said.
While the research is hopeful for patients looking for inexpensive ways to manage their cancer, more needs to be learned about the effects of exercise on metastasis and longevity, as well as if the observations hold true in humans.
Hojman also wants to explore the combined impact of anti-cancer treatments and exercise on tumours.
"One of the main questions that cancer patients always ask is - how should I exercise?" Hojman said.
"While it has previously been difficult to advise people about the intensity at which they should exercise, our data suggest that it might be beneficial to exercise at a somewhat high intensity in order to provoke a good epinephrine surge and hence recruitment of NK cells," she said.
The study was published in the journal Cell Metabolism.
