Improve Cancer Survivors’ Quality of Life With Exercise Plan

For cancer survivors who exercise, overall quality of life is higher and the rate of cancer recurrence is lower. Unfortunately, many patients fail to follow their doctor’s recommendations for exercise.

Now, nurses can help make planning and monitoring postcancer exercise easy for their patients. A new brochure from the University of Colorado Cancer Center, recently published in the Clinical Journal of Oncology Nursing and endorsed by the American College of Sports Medicine, is now downloadable for use.

“Our program is geared toward small steps, reaching goals, and then modifying them as needed,” says Catherine Jankowski, PhD, investigator at the CU Cancer Center and assistant research professor of geriatric medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

“This is a valuable link between the clinic and home,” says Ellyn Matthews, PhD, RN, assistant professor in the CU College of Nursing and coauthor of the exercise brochure. “It’s been that at the end of treatment, cancer patients are told to exercise but left completely on their own, and we’ve seen that this can lead to a dangerous lack of exercise. Our materials try to get cancer patients to ask ‘what can I do myself to improve my quality of life through exercise?’” To help survivors begin an exercise program, physicians can include the brochure in patients’ paperwork.

The program leads cancer survivors through the process of:

• Choosing an exercise
• Determining short- and long-term goals
• Observing progress
• Updating goals as needed

In order to maximize patient well-being in regard to psychological and physical health, the brochure also helps the varied population of cancer survivors personalize their exercise goals.

According to Jankowski and Matthews, a key challenge for cancer survivors is the belief that exercise will increase the fatigue that can accompany cancer treatment. The researchers say the reverse is true: As in the population at large, exercise decreases feelings of fatigue in cancer patients.

“Actually our exercise recommendations for cancer survivors aren’t that much different than recommendations for healthy Americans, but getting to that level of activity might take cancer survivors a little longer and require additional support,” Jankowski says.

Source: University of Colorado Denver.