Striving4Zen

Gyms and fitness centers have begun stepping in to meet a small but growing demand for programs designed to not only hasten recovery but to address the fatigue of chemotherapy, the swelling of lymphedema and the loss of muscle tone.

Sponsored by Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, this class for cancer patients has been around for some time, mostly in a league by itself. But in recent years, following studies that found exercise to be beneficial in combating the effects of cancer, the class has gained some company.

There have always been athletically inclined patients who stayed active, even competitive, in the wake of a diagnosis. A recent high-profile example is Eric Shanteau, an American Olympic swimmer who decided to put off testicular-cancer surgery until he had competed in Beijing.

But most of the roughly 10 million cancer survivors in the US are not amateur Lance Armstrongs. Many, though, are inspired by celebrities like Mr. Armstrong, seeing them as models for how to come out on the other side of often-debilitating treatment regimens.

A new program from the Y.M.C.A., in partnership with the Lance Armstrong Foundation, offers cancer fitness classes at more than a dozen Y’s in 10 states. At the women’s gym Curves International, researchers from Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia are looking at whether overweight breast-cancer patients can keep to a five-day-a-week Curves routine for six months. And survivors are organizing their own classes.

In some cases, oncologists are prescribing exercise, gently prodding patients to tackle whatever activity they can manage: light walking, simple stretches, exercise with resistance bands.

“The effects — what we call effect sizes in statistical research — were enormous,” she said, “and I was like ‘How come no one is talking about this?’ ” She had given up exercise a decade earlier, but the study inspired her to go back to the gym.

“I started feeling so much better,” she said. “And it struck me that if I’m feeling this good, then every cancer survivor should.”

Scientists also took notice of studies showing that those who were physically active and eating well were less likely to develop cancer. They then asked what impact exercise and diet would have on those with the disease, said Dr. Charles Fuchs, an oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston who studies cancer and exercise.

In the last eight years, a dearth of research has become a flood of studies. Among them is one sponsored by the National Cancer Institute in 2006 that looked at the effects of moderate exercise on groups of breast and prostate cancer patients undergoing radiation therapy for six weeks.

Those assigned to a daily program — taking walks of increasing distance and doing exercises with a resistance band — had less fatigue, greater strength and better aerobic capacity than those who were not instructed to exercise. This finding, and similar ones, has been replicated many times.

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Labels: cancer, exercise, Holistic Health, study