Tumors in Mice Grow With Exercise

A test rodent in a cage in a laboratory usually has a membership to an exclusive health club: a wheel to run on. All for the sake of trying to learn more about human beings.

In a lab at Duke University Medical Center, researchers embedded human prostate tumors into 50 mice and then the group was split in half—25 in an environment where exercise was impossible and the other half were able to stroll around for about a half a mile a day. The tumors in the exercising group grew much more than the secluded group of mice.

Doctors urge individuals suffering from prostate cancer not to worry about the results. The mice were not receiving treatment for the disease, while most humans would be, unless they were not yet diagnosed. Plus, working out regularly while being treated for prostate cancer helps push the medicine around the body with the increased pumping blood—the cancer slows this process down considerably.

Mice are great little test subjects, but are they still so different from people. [BBC]