Summary
Many cancer patients experience long-term side effects like fatigue, anxiety, and neuropathy. While exercise helps, most programs aren’t tailored to individual symptoms. Supervised exercise is more effective, but travel and time are barriers for people to participate. Live-remote supervision via video calls (Zoom) may be a promising solution, though its effectiveness in cancer patients is still unproven.
This study is assessing the general effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of a personalised live-remote exercise intervention on quality of life and treatment-related side effects.
You may be eligible if you have cancer that has been treated with systemic chemotherapy and are ≥ 12 weeks to 1 year after completion of primary treatment of invasive cancer with curative intent; have reported one of the following side-effects: fatigue, low-physical functioning in daily life, anxiety and/or depressive symptoms, or chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy; and be relatively physically inactive.
Eligible participants will be randomly allocated to one of two study arms: an exercise group (12 weeks) and a wait list control group.
The intervention consists of three live-remote exercise sessions per week. Participants in the exercise group will receive the intervention after the baseline visit and the wait list control participants after the 12-week follow up visit.
A modular approach will be used to tailor the intervention to each participant's specific main side-effect. Each participant will receive the same base module (twice a week) to address health-related quality of life, and in addition one out of four specific modules (once a week) addressing their individual main seide-effect. In addition to the live-remote training, participants will be provided with the LION app and an activity tracker (Fitbit) at the start of the intervention to support exercise beyond the supervised program, during holidays and after the end of the intervention.
In addition to exercise, the intervention also has an education component including information about general effects of exercise for cancer patients and why exercise is important for specific side-effects. The provision of such education is seen as an integral part of adequate exercise programming.
After the intervention period of 12-weeks, patients will be followed up until 36 weeks. In this follow-up period, also two sub studies take place:
- Sensor-based guidance sub study (only control patients from Cologne)
- Live-remote physical fitness and function testing (in all control patients; all sites)