medwireNews: The SURfit trial has demonstrated that increasing intense physical activity levels over a year has a positive impact on fatigue among adult childhood cancer survivors.
Additionally, participants who adhered to the individualized physical activity intervention also experienced improvements in physical health-related quality of life (HRQoL), note the researchers in Cancer.
They add: “Even small effects could have considerable long‐term benefits as psychosocial late‐effects are results of accumulated risk over a lifetime.”
The single-center trial included 151 individuals who received a cancer diagnosis when they were younger than 16.0 years old (mean age 7.4 years). The participants were enrolled to the study after the age of 16.0 years and at least 5.0 years after diagnosis, at a mean age of 30.4 years. The most common tumor type in the cohort was leukemia, in 36% of patients, followed by lymphoma and central nervous system tumors, in 21% and 11%, respectively.
Participants who were randomly assigned to the intervention received personalized physical activity counselling to increase intense physical activity by at least 2.5 h/week for a year, while controls maintained usual physical activity levels.
The current report focuses on the prespecified secondary outcomes of HRQoL, fatigue, and distress symptoms, with the modified intention-to-treat analysis showing a significantly greater decline in fatigue from baseline at 12 months among patients who did versus did not receive the intervention. Marginal mean T scores on the 20‐item Checklist Individual Strength questionnaire decreased by 2.10 points in the intervention group and increased by 1.47 points in the control group, giving a significant between-group difference of –3.56 points.
There were, however, no significant differences between study arms with respect to the physical or mental components of the Short Form-36 HRQoL questionnaire or psychologic distress as assessed by the Brief Symptom Inventory.
The significant reduction in fatigue with increased intense physical activity was confirmed in per-protocol analyses comprising participants who adhered to their treatment allocation, and these individuals also demonstrated a significant improvement in physical HRQoL with the intervention.
Wei Deng, from Oslo University Hospital in Norway, and collaborators say that their results “support existing guidelines for [physical activity] interventions that reduce fatigue and improve physical HRQOL in cancer survivors.”
And they conclude: “[Physical activity] should be recommended to all survivors in follow‐up care as a cheap and safe preventive measure, especially to those with symptoms of fatigue, thereby informing the evidence‐based practice in follow‐up care of [childhood cancer survivors].”
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Cancer 2024; doi:10.1002/cncr.35207