Being Active Can Help Frailty After Cancer Treatment

When considering health-related quality of life, it’s important to think about the “small changes” patients with kidney or bladder cancers can make at home, an expert told CURE®.

Health-related quality of life refers to the “ability to live a fulfilling life” based on the impacts of a person’s health, according to Johns Hopkins Medicine. This also plays a role in functioning, whether it’s physical, psychological or social.

To improve common health-related quality of life factors, such as frailty, patients should remain active because they can become “deconditioned very quickly,” Dr. Eric A. Singer, a urologic oncologist and chief, Division of Urologic Oncology at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center, said during an interview with CURE®.

“We can make some changes,” he said. “Even small changes add up over time.”

Singer sat down with CURE® to discuss the steps patients with kidney or bladder cancers can take to help manage their health-related quality of life.

Transcript:

[Be] attentive to their comorbidities. Cancer is a scary, scary thing, but we can't just focus on that and ignore diabetes or hypertension (high blood pressure), or other things that are going on. Being active — so getting up and moving, even if it's not much, just to begin that process. People can become deconditioned very quickly, even [after] a couple days of resting on the couch or the recliner. You can begin to see a decline in what they're able to do, so really thinking about it, so we can get an assessment [and] we can see how people are doing. Then we can make some changes, and even small changes add up over time.

Even just walking, starting small, [by] walking up and down your street doesn't require any weights, doesn't require any special equipment, just to be doing that. Of course, if somebody has issues with [their] knees, or hips or arthritis or other things, there are other things we can get them doing to be active. But again, just trying to avoid being sedentary, and sitting in the same place or sitting for most of the day. Then again, not easy, even if we're just doing a few walks a day that builds up over time, and you're gonna see that stamina improve. And that can be a real benefit.

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