Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Correspondence to: Luca M. Neri, luca. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 3. Cancer patients experience symptoms and adverse effects of treatments that may last even after the end of treatments.
Exercise is a safe, non-pharmacological and cost-effective therapy that can provide several health benefits in cancer patient and survivors, reducing cancer symptoms and cancer treatment side effects. The purpose of this review is to describe how the physical exercise is capable to reduce cancer symptoms and cancer treatment side effects.
We realized a pragmatic classification of symptoms, dividing them into physical, psychological and psycho-physical aspects. For each symptom we discuss causes, therapies, we analyse the effects of physical exercise and we summarize the most effective type of exercise to reduce the symptoms. This review also points out what are the difficulties that patients and survivors face during the practice of physical activity and provides some solutions to overcome these barriers. Related to each specific cancer, it emerges that type, frequency and intensity of physical exercise could be prescribed and supervised as a therapeutic program, like it occurs for the type, dose and duration of a drug treatment.
Keywords: cancer survivors, cancer treatments, psycho-physical symptoms, physical exercise, physical activity treatments. Cancer symptoms and adverse effects of cancer therapies can be resolved or persist for days, weeks, or years.
Physical activity is defined as any bodily movement produced by skeletal muscles that results in energy expenditure, which may be unstructured and everyday life activity, exercise that includes prearranged, deliberate and repetitive activity and grassroots sports and competitive sports [ 1 ]. The present review explores the impact of physical activity on physical, psycho-physical and psychological aspects on adverse effects of cancer.
