Exercise Improved Quality of Life for Metastatic Breast Cancer Patients

Among patients with metastatic breast cancer, those who took part in a 9-month structured exercise program reported less fatigue and improved quality of life compared with patients receiving usual care, results from the PREFERABLE-EFFECT trial presented at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium showed.

In this exclusive MedPage Today video, investigator Anne May, PhD, of University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands, gives an overview the findings.

Following is a transcript of her remarks:

What we did, we recruited patients from five European countries and Australia and randomized these patients to either the exercise intervention or the usual care group.

After the intervention group received a 9-month exercise program, and our results were that this program leads to beneficial effects. So patients had a higher quality of life, lower levels of fatigue as compared to the control group. And moreover, we also found that if exercise has positive effects on physical fitness, physical functioning, social and role functioning, and the latter means that they reported that they could better function in their social life with their families and friends, or if they still were working, that also working life was better by performing the exercise intervention.

And also important for us, we found that patients in the exercise invention group had decreased levels of pain and dyspnea, which are very distressing symptoms for patients during the treatment.

So we are quite excited about our results and think that it really adds, because now — we only knew about positive effects if patients receive treatment with curative intent — and now we know that also in the metastatic setting exercise can have positive effects.

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