Digital and community-based, personally tailored activity support among older adults living with and beyond cancer

Project Description

The number of people living with and beyond cancer has doubled over the past 40 years. This is mainly due to better cancer screening and treatments. This is good news, but it also means more people are living with side effects from their cancer and the treatments they had for it. Side effects like fatigue, nausea, weight gain, feeling anxious or depressed are common. They are also more likely to get another chronic disease like diabetes or heart disease. Regular physical activity helps improve the body and mind; for example, physical activity can improve energy levels, muscle growth, improve ability to perform everyday activities, and overall quality of life. It can also help depression, stress, and body-image issues. People who do regular activity are less likely to have their cancer return and are more likely to live longer.

Even with all these benefits, many people living with or beyond cancer are not doing the suggested weekly amount of two and a half hours moderate intensity activity. Behaviour change studies which aim to help people living with or beyond cancer increase their activity have mainly used face-to-face/supervised sessions, printed booklets, and/or telephone. These help people to increase their activity over short time periods but not in the longer term. These methods take a lot of time, are costly, and/or depend on a person’s location. Recent studies have been using online or smartphone methods which have promising results but trouble keeping people motivated. We think a combination of gym- and web-based programme delivery will be successful, but we don’t know how much supervision is the right amount.

We want to see if we can run a study that will compare a gym- and/or home-based personal activity programme with online support to usual care plus general PA advice, to people living with or beyond cancer. Patient representatives that I spoke with have said this is important research and felt that activity helped them in their recovery. It is even in the top 10 James Lind Alliance top priority living with and beyond cancer research questions.

We are currently adapting a physical activity support website (built by the PI in Canada) that can provide a personal activity programme to people in the UK. The programme is computer-tailored based on self-reported survey data and wearable activity trackers like Fitbits that synchronise with the website.

We will work together with community-based exercise professionals (for example, personal trainers in local gyms, etc.) to train exercise specialists in cancer specific education and skills related to activity. This will be done online using a website that we are currently building. Exercise professionals will be trained to deliver a personalised programme to participants that will then move to online support. The online platform will also be able to deliver personalised programmes that will be able to adapt to increases or decreases in ability to the participants over the rest of the study period.

At the end of our study, we hope to know if this is a useful programme for people living with and beyond cancer, if a larger trial is possible, and how best we can run it.