Improving Patients' Quality of Life with Implementation of a Rehabilitation Exercise Program Post Cancer Treatment

Research Objectives: To investigate the impact of an exercise rehabilitation program effect adherence to the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) exercise recommendations, quality of life (QOL) and physical functional (PF) outcomes at completion of the program.

Design: The Plan-Do-Study Act model was used as the framework of this project to examine the effects of an exercise rehabilitation program on measured outcomes for cancer survivors 3 months status post completion of an outpatient exercise rehabilitation program.

Setting: Hospital based outpatient cancer and rehabilitation center.

Participants: Cancer survivors seen within the survivorship clinic who were identified as noncompliant with ACSM PA recommendations and reported one of the clinical problems were considered eligible for intervention. These clinical problems are chronic fatigue, cognitive issues, depression, anxiety, arthralgia or myalgia, poor tolerance to PA, ECOG status of 1 or higher, and history of or at high risk for osteopenia or osteoporosis.

Interventions: 1. The ACSM PA Vital Sign at a survivorship office visits triggering a referral to cancer exercise program.
2. Referral to the cancer exercise program included an initial evaluation with a physical therapist, therapy as indicated, and a personalized exercise prescription.
3. Two follow up visits with an exercise physiologist.

Main Outcome Measures: 1. QOL as measured by the FACT-G survey.
2. Strength as measured by gross manual muscle testing (MMT).
3. Endurance as measured by sit to stand tests and 6 minute walk distance.
4. Increase total time engaged in PA per week.

Results: Findings indicate an 71% of referred patients (10/14) completed initial PT visit and 50% of those patients (5/10) completed to entire program.
All patients who completed the cancer exercise program significantly improved all QOL domains of FACT-G, increased weekly exercise minutes on average by 71.25 minutes (137.5% increase), and improvement with all domains measured for PF improved.

Conclusions: The findings suggests that completion of an exercise rehabilitation program post cancer treatment can have a large positive impact on QOL, PF, and PA. Further studies are warranted with larger sample sizes are needed.

Author(s) Disclosures: None