Overcoming pediatric cancer may only mark the beginning of a young survivor's lifelong battle to stay healthy.
While survivors of childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) face an increased risk of developing serious health complications as a result of their cancer treatment, for a variety of reasons many avoid simple exercise and healthy lifestyle changes that could reverse the damage, according to a team of researchers based at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.
Adult survivors of childhood ALL are less physically active than the general U.S. population, the team reports in the July issue of Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers, & Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. Furthermore, adult survivors of ALL who received cranial radiotherapy (CRT), or "whole brain radiation," as children reported the lowest activity among all adults, suggesting that the type of therapy administered to a child may impair his or her physical activity in the future.
To protect adult childhood cancer survivors from a future of disease, researchers say patients should work with health care providers to develop plans for healthier and more active lifestyles.
"Research shows that physical activity can undo risk caused by treatment," said senior author Kevin C. Oeffinger, M.D., from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, N.Y. 'small, incremental steps can make a big difference in improving health outcomes."
Dr. Oeffinger and his colleagues compared the physical activity levels of over 2,600 adult survivors of ALL, ages 18 to 44, as reported by patients in the Childhood Cancer Survivor Study (CCSS) in 2003, to physical activity of age-matched adults in the general U.S. population, as reported in the 2003 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) survey. The CCSS is a multi-institution study sponsored by the National Cancer Institutes, and the BRFSS is a state-based survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). In both surveys, study participants were asked to report the number of times they had participated in physical activity or exercise during the prior month.
The study found that adult ALL survivors were less likely to meet the CDC physical activity guidelines (52.8 percent vs. 48.2 percent) and more likely to report no moderate or vigorous physical activity during the month preceding the survey (23 percent vs. 20.3 percent), with the highest levels of physical inactivity in ALL survivors who had received CRT treatment. Women who were treated with a moderate dose of CRT were twice as likely to be physically inactive as women in the general population.
"It's important to remember that these patients are not couch potatoes or lazy," said Dr. Oeffinger. "Our findings suggest that CRT has fundamentally altered something in the central nervous system that's leading to a decrease in levels of physical activity."