WA-based research found that exercise may help relieve symptoms of depression and anxiety in men with prostate cancer.
For men with prostate cancer, starting or completing their cancer treatment is associated with mental health issues. At least one in four men suffer from anxiety and one in five report depression, all related to their prostate cancer treatment.
Now, research led by Edith Cowan University has found a simple way to improve the mental health of men with prostate cancer: exercise.
In their study, researchers studied 135 prostate cancer patients (aged 43 to 90 year) who were receiving androgen deprivation therapy. Patients were randomly placed into different weekly exercise programs, including supervised impact loading and resistance exercise, supervised aerobic and resistance exercise, and usual care/delayed supervised aerobic exercise. This exercise plan was followed twice per week, for 12 months.
After 12-months, patients completed a self-report checklist called BSI-18, a commonly used approach to assess psychological symptoms in medical patients. Using this approach, researchers assessed levels of anxiety, depression, somatisation, and global severity index (GSI) in their patients. Somatisation is the tendency to experience psychological distress in the form of somatic symptoms, and to seek medical help for these symptoms. GSI is a score that measures a patient’s outcome from a treatment program, based on reducing symptom severity.
Key findings
The results of this study showed significant improvement in symptoms of depression and anxiety as well as for GSI. In contrast, no significant improvement was found for somatisation. The study also found that men with the highest level of anxiety, depression, somatization, and GSI improved the most with exercise.
“We know that exercise benefits people with cancer. Whether you do aerobic exercise or resistance exercise it doesn’t matter, as long as it’s at moderate to high intensity, it’s beneficial for reducing symptoms of depression and anxiety,” says Prof Daniel Galvão, Director of the ECU Exercise Medicine Research Institute and lead author of the study in a press release.
The authors conclude that various supervised exercise modes, such as aerobic, resistance and impact loading, are effective ways to reduce psychological stress, as long as they are conducted at moderate to high levels of intensity.