Take a walk. That’s the recommendation of Philadelphia researchers who found pancreatic cancer patients who began a regular exercise program that involved walking were less fatigued than those who did not.
The study, published in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons, involved 102 cancer patients whose recovery was tracked by Thomas Jefferson University School of Nursing researchers. The patients, who were primarily in their 60s, were divided into two groups. Those in the first group began a walking or exercise routine (of 90 to 150 minutes each week) after being discharged from the hospital; the others did not.
After three months, the walking group reported a 27 percent improvement in fatigue, compared with a 19 percent improvement in the non-exercising group. The walkers also reported experiencing less pain than the other group. At the beginning of the study, 85 percent of all patients reported moderate to severe fatigue.
Each year, about 50,000 people are diagnosed with pancreatic or periampullary cancer -- an enlargement of the ducts from the liver and pancreas where they join and enter the small intestine. The National Cancer Institute estimates chronic fatigue affects up to 96 percent of those patients after they are treated for cancer.
""The message in pancreatic cancer care has typically been that these patients are just too sick to do this [exercise], but that's not true anymore," said the new study's lead author Theresa P. Yeo. "There is no reason that patients can't become active, even if they did not exercise before."