Exercising can help cancer patients feel better mentally and physically, a new analysis of data from published research shows.

But it remains unclear what type of exercise is most effective or how much a person needs to work out in order to benefit, lead author Dr. Vicki S. Conn of Missouri University-Columbia’s Sinclair School of Nursing and her colleagues note.

The benefits of exercise for healthy people are well known, but the growing body of research on whether exercise can help patients undergoing cancer treatment has produced mixed results, the researchers report in the July issue of Supportive Care in Cancer.

To investigate, Conn and her team combined the findings of 30 previous studies that investigated the effects of exercise on cancer patients. Thirteen of the studies were conducted with breast cancer patients, while 21 looked at supervised exercise rather than at-home workouts.

Exercise had the strongest effect on boosting patients’ physical function, such as improving their ability to climb stairs or walk a certain distance. It improved patients’ body composition, increasing the percentage of lean muscle mass to total weight.

Exercise reduced some symptoms, such as nausea and vomiting and pain, and modest improvements were seen in fatigue, mood and quality of life.

Given the relatively small benefits for exercise identified by their analysis, Conn and her colleagues suggest combining exercise with other inventions designed to improve cancer patients’ physical and mental health.

“Overall, the data support the potential efficacy of exercise interventions among cancer patients,” Conn and her colleagues write. “Controlled experiments testing variations in intervention components and delivery are urgently needed to move forward our understanding of effective strategies to improve health and well being outcomes in this population.”

SOURCE: Supportive Care in Cancer, July 2006.