Working Out During Breast Cancer Treatment

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Summary and Comment

Working Out During Breast Cancer Treatment

Supervised group exercise during treatment for early breast cancer delivered some benefits.

Cancer treatment often leads to fatigue, loss of functional capacity, and weight gain. To assess the benefits of exercise during treatment for breast cancer, investigators randomized 203 women in treatment for early-stage breast cancer to receive either 45 minutes of supervised group exercise followed by a group discussion twice a week for 12 weeks or a brochure providing guidelines for exercise after cancer diagnosis. At 12 weeks and at 6 months, participants completed questionnaires to ascertain quality of life and measures of other physical and functional outcomes.

Compared with the control group at 12 weeks, the exercise group showed significantly greater improvement in some measures of physical and psychological function, including 12-minute–walk distance, reported weekly physical activity, shoulder mobility, and positive mood. At the 6-month follow-up, significant differences between the groups persisted for almost all of these outcomes. However, general quality of life did not differ significantly between the two groups at either 12 weeks or 6 months, although an intervention effect on breast cancer–specific quality of life emerged in the exercise group at 6 months.

Comment: Significant improvements in physical measures, such as range of shoulder motion and distance walked in 12 minutes, demonstrated that exercise had a measurable effect in the study group. The authors acknowledge, however, that just being part of a group probably had a positive impact. As much as we would like to identify exercise as the causative variable, determining whether the differences between the groups were due to the exercise, the group experience, or both is difficult. Nonetheless, as in other patients, exercise is well worth encouraging in breast cancer patients.

— Wendy S. Biggs, MD

Published in Journal Watch Women's Health March 22, 2007

Citation(s):

Mutrie N et al. Benefits of supervised group exercise programme for women being treated for early stage breast cancer: Pragmatic randomised controlled trial. BMJ 2007 Mar 10; 334:517-20.