By: Maria-Paula
Managing psychological stress may help reduce persistent fatigue among breast cancer survivors, according to research examining the long-term effects of cancer treatment.
Fatigue is one of the most common lasting effects of cancer treatment and can interfere with daily activities, sleep, and quality of life. Researchers are increasingly studying how stress, fatigue, and cardiovascular health are connected as more people survive cancer and live longer after treatment.
“As cancer therapies continue to improve, more patients are surviving and living longer with the lasting effects of their treatment, including fatigue,” said Greg Hundley, MD. He added that understanding what drives post-treatment fatigue is increasingly important for cardiologists and cardio-oncologists caring for cancer survivors.
Studies have found that higher psychological stress is associated with greater fatigue and other physical symptoms among breast cancer survivors. Stress-management approaches, including counseling, mindfulness, and appropriately tailored physical activity, may therefore provide an additional tool for improving survivors’ quality of life.
Researchers caution, however, that more work is needed to determine whether the same relationship exists among survivors of other cancers and whether it varies according to treatments such as chemotherapy, radiation, surgery, immunotherapy and hormone therapy.
“It’s important to understand the causes of post-cancer-treatment fatigue and develop programmatic solutions to prevent this fatigue that can be quite debilitating,” Hundley said.
The research is part of the UPBEAT, Understanding and Predicting Breast Cancer Events after Treatment, study, sponsored by Wake Forest University Health Sciences and the National Cancer Institute and conducted through the Wake Forest NCI Community Oncology Research Program Research Base and the ECOG-ACRIN Cancer Research Group. The study is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov as NCT02791581.
As cancer survival rates improve, researchers say survivorship care must increasingly focus not only on preventing cancer recurrence but also on helping survivors maintain their physical and emotional well-being long after treatment ends.
