Background
Cancer is one of the major prevalent diseases in the world and is considered the leading disease of the new millennium. Breast cancer represents the most diagnosed tumour in developed countries.
Survival rates are steadily increasing, due to prevention campaigns and innovative medicine, so the number of breast cancer survivors is expected to grow further in the next years.
Soon, healthcare systems will not be able to provide all survivors with prolonged rehabilitation care for the long-term effects of therapies.
Self-managed physical activity as an answer to chronicity
Self-care programs are a promising response to the issue of chronicity, as proposed by the Chronic Care Model.
Women may experience many side effects, such as upper limb lymphedema, arthralgia, cancer-related fatigue and other issues. These affect their quality of life and could last over the years after therapies. The Chronic Care Model suggests addressing such patients as chronic ones, supporting their daily self-management at home, instead of providing intensive but brief rehabilitation programs at the hospital.
Our new scoping review on self-care
The scientific literature has demonstrated the benefits of supervised physical activity for breast cancer survivors. We questioned whether similar but self-managed programs existed in the literature.
Together with the Rehabilitation Department of the Azienda USL-IRCCS di Reggio Emilia, we recently published a scoping review mapping the available evidence regarding self-managed physical activity and rehabilitation for breast cancer survivors. We considered which types of exercise were most employed, the duration and frequencies, and the effectiveness reported by the authors. We also analyzed the strategies implemented to help patients integrate exercise into their daily life.
This scoping review provides a user-friendly and well-organized summary of self-managed programs, including physical activity for breast cancer survivors. Clinicians can consult it when designing tailored programs for their patients. In addition, researchers can find insights for conducting new studies and fill the remaining gaps of knowledge.
The open-access full text can be found here.
Among the included papers, there was our randomized controlled trial on self-administered lymphatic drainage for lymphedema, conducted at the IRCCS Azienda-USL di Reggio Emilia.
The paper comes from the dissertation of Dr. Maria Chiara Bò, PT, who’s been working with us for two years. Multidisciplinarity is the foundation of our everyday work!
Conducting this type of review was a new challenge for our research group. MerloBioEngineering is committed to bringing innovative contributions of immediate practical applicability to the rehabilitation field.
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