Exercise in the rehabilitation of breast cancer survivors

Abstract

With the increase in the number of women who have survived breast cancer, there is a growing need to attend to the physical and emotional effects of cancer and its treatment as experienced by these survivors. Psychological distress, fatigue, weight gain, premature menopause and changes in body image are some of the long‐term sequelae of breast cancer. Exercise as an adjunctive treatment may help to attenuate these effects and thereby contribute to rehabilitation of women with breast cancer. We present data from the exercise literature and from studies on breast cancer patients that support this role of exercise. Following a critique of the research efforts, we present a brief outline of questions that should be addressed in evaluating the role of exercise in cancer rehabilitation. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Physical activity and quality of life in head and neck cancer survivors

“…Many symptoms that influence poor QoL in head and neck cancer patients are similar to those found in other cancer patients to be beneficially influenced by physical activity interventions [11,15,20]. For example, the most frequent psychological symptoms include worry, anxiety, mood disorders, fatigue, and depression, and the potentially disfiguring nature of the treatment may damage body image and self-esteem [10].…”

Tai Chi Chuan, health-related quality of life and self-esteem: A randomized trial with breast cancer survivors

“…Exercise has been found to be a safe method for enhancing HRQL among cancer patients [11] and increasing self-esteem in healthy populations [12,16,17,26,33,34,36]. In breast cancer survivors, four studies have demonstrated positive relationships between physical activity and self-esteem [4,27,30,31].…”

Exercise and side effects among 749 patients during and after treatment for cancer: a University of Rochester Cancer Center Community Clinical Oncology Program Study

“…This preliminary evidence suggests that physical exercise is a nonpharmacological behavioral intervention that shows great promise in mitigating the side effects experienced by cancer patients, both during and after receiving treatment, as well as improving QOL. Specifically, exercise is suggested to improve fatigue, QOL, emotional distress, immunological parameters, aerobic capacity, muscular strength, flexibility, and body composition among cancer survivors during and after treatment [3,8,9,11,14,15,18,19,[21][22][23][24][25][26][27]. Unfortunately, most studies have been small (averaging 50 patients and ranging from 9 to 155 participants [11,14,27]), single institution, intervention studies.…”