Dancing for Better Cancer Health?

Dancing for Better Cancer Health?

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Dancing is a deeply engaging experience. It combines social interaction, communal get-together, cardiovascular exercise, coordination and balance – alone and with a partner –, rhythmic timing and musical engagement, as well as potential romantic or sexual undertones, depending on the style of dance, partner choice, and social setting.

Wouldn't it thus be practically magical, if it could also help you in your game of outliving cancer?

I wager you're nodding along right about now, not necessarily because you so love dancing – maybe you've never engaged in it –, but perhaps simply due to broad curiosity. After all, dancing is as close to universal across human cultures as one can come, being more cross-culturally ubiquitous than monogamous mating.^1–3

Of course, I'm not proposing, that dancing evolved as some cultural antidote to cancer. 

Although that would be a funny April's fools joke, it doesn't quite seem reasonable. Nonetheless, there is a rather big body of research – both on dancing directly and on some of the aspects inherent in or tangential to dancing (exercise, social interaction) – indicating, that dancing can have benefits for cancer patients such as yourself.

So, let's start by looking at controlled studies directly investigating the effect of dancing on cancer patients, before making supportive inferences from studies of constituent parts of dancing (exercise, social interaction).

For the direct study of the effect dancing can have on cancer patients, I want to show you one small trial of breast cancer patients.⁴ For our purposes, we'll focus on the 50 patients in the study, who successfully completed the 6-week tango argentino programme, the effect of which on the patients was the subject of study. The prerequisite for participation was that the patients had gone through primary oncological treatment for a stage I–III cancer diagnosed 12–48 months before enrolment.

The caveat to the results of this study are undoubtedly already obvious to you from this: stage IV cancer patients were excluded, as were patients with survival shorter than 12 or longer than 48 months. Moreover, the patients had already undergone treatment at the time of this study and weren't still in the throes of classical therapy.

Interestingly in these post–primary treatment patients, completion of this 6-week tango programme with its six weekly one-hour sessions led to a marked improvement of their general health, insomnia, daytime sleepiness, fatigue (physical and cognitive), and diarrhoea. It also improved their physical, cognitive, social, and role functioning.

Such improvements are quite drastically helpful to cancer patients, enabling them to reenter normal life, but does social interaction and exercise also help cancer patients actively undergoing treatments?

Luckily, there are studies on this. In breast cancer, for example exercise has been shown to improve cardiovascular function in patients partaking of anthracycline-based chemotherapy regimens.^5–6 This is significant, because anthracyclines are cardiotoxic (toxic to the heart) and usually diminish cardiac function.

One of the two studies found a dose-response relationship between physical activity and cardiotoxicity (meaning more physical activity led to less toxicity toward the heart), whilst the other found no such relationship between physical exercise and markers of cardiotoxicity.

Nonetheless, both these studies agreed, that physical activity was beneficial to cardiovascular functioning in patients undergoing such anthracycline-based chemotherapies.

Another study supports the positive effect of physical activity on the health-related quality of life and functional capacity of breast cancer patients.⁷ Functional capacity was hereby determined by grip strength and chair sit-to-stand test.

Now, for breast cancer patients this is all good and well, but what about patients suffering from other cancers? And perhaps most interestingly: does exercise improve cancer patient survival duration?

Nicely, there was a meta-analysis published in 2025, which collected the effects of exercise on cancer patient survival from 151 cohorts with almost 1.5 million total subjects. It found that exercise indeed improved the survival of patients suffering from breast, lung, prostate, colorectal, or skin cancer.⁸

This all indicates, that physical activity isn't just helpful to cancer patients post treatment, but also during treatment and should thus be recommended, if within the patient's capacity. Bringing it back to dancing, I think this cements the physical exercise part of dancing as distinctly helpful for cancer patients, both during treatment and recovery, as well as both for quality of life and duration of life.

So, what about the second major aspect of dancing? What about social interaction? Does that have any effect whatsoever on cancer patient quality and duration of life?

I think it shouldn't be too surprising, that the degree of social support patients experience affects their quality of life. The more well-supported they are, the better their quality of life.⁹ The interesting part about this is, that patients receiving social support function better not only socially, but also physiologically.

When asked what gives these patients strength during illness, unsurprisingly the most common answers were related to family and friends, followed by answers related to faith and hope and then positive thinking and attitude.

It's probably not much surprising to you, that answers related to specialists and professional help ranked fourth with only 20% of patients giving answers in this category. After all, most medical professionals do focus on treating the ails of the patient's body, but entirely neglect the all-important mental and spiritual health and well-being of the patient – at least, in the West.

This is a catastrophic shortcoming of classical care, for other studies show the same benefits of social support and mental welfare to patient quality of life.^10–11 But, does improved social support and quality of life also exhibit an impact on the longevity of the patients?

Fascinatingly, yes.¹² Patients, who ranked their satisfaction with their social support as 'excellent', 'very good', or 'good', outlived their counterparts ranking their satisfaction with their social support as 'fair' or 'poor'. Paradoxically however, the actual level of social support didn't change the survival duration of the patients.

Let me repeat that: patients, who perceived better social support (had higher satisfaction with their social support), lived longer than those who perceived worse social support, irrespective of actual amount of social support rendered.

This means, that it's seemingly more important for patients to remain satisfied with their social lives, than to have any specific social structure around them, which probably isn't that surprising. After all, we all enjoy different relationships, modes of social interaction, intensities of emotional exchange, etc.

A statistical analysis of satisfaction with social support, mortality risk, and various cancer-relevant inflammatory markers indicated, that satisfaction with social support may indeed mediate its positive effects for patient survival through the lowering of inflammatory markers.

As this is associative data, the direction of causality – if any causal connection exists – isn't known. It could well be, that lower levels of inflammation cause both better patient survival and better satisfaction with social support.

The logic behind this directionality is, that precisely those inflammatory markers, which are diminished in patients more satisfied with their social support (IL-6 and TNF-alpha), have been found to be able to cause depression.¹³

Thus, it's undoubtedly the smartest to attack this problem from both sides. We want to normalise IL-6 and TNF-alpha, which are often elevated in cancer patients, and we want to improve satisfaction with social support.

And this brings us back to dancing – or exercise and social connection in general.

I think it's safe to say at this point, that dancing for better cancer health is decidedly supported in the literature. We looked at studies in dancing itself, at studies on the effects of exercise on patient quality and duration of life, and at studies on the effect of social support. All of these indicated, that more physical activity and better satisfaction with social support are helpful to cancer patient quality and duration of life.

I think this again shows us just how essential it is to play this game of outliving cancer with as many vectors of healing as you can manage.

Furthermore, I think it's important to generalise our findings from this review. You don't need to go dancing, if that isn't for you, but it can be extremely helpful to your efforts to engage in physical activity and to improve your own satisfaction with your own social life.

Whether you do that through dancing is entirely up to you and to what you love doing most.

Dance, ski, run, bike, and laugh toward swift healing and lasting health.

God bless,

Merlin L. Marquard.