Prostate Cancer Survivors and Exercise and Behavioral Counseling

Physical activity (PA) has a positive impact on clinical outcomes such as improvement in overall QoL, cancer-specific mortality, reducing treatment-related toxicities, and reducing fatigue across many cancer survivor groups including PCS. Despite these benefits of regular PA, the majority of PCS are still not meeting public health PA guidelines.

Short-term supervised PA programs have been shown to improve health-related fitness and patient-reported outcomes in PCS, but PA declines significantly after the supervised intervention has been completed. Research examining the effect of short- term supervised exercise programs on motivational outcomes and longer term PA among cancer survivors is limited, especially theoretical approaches to identify key motivational outcomes for behavior change.

This study will pilot a two-armed, single blind, RCT comparing SPA+EC to SPA+BC. The proposed RCT in PCS is noteworthy given that it differs from standard approaches to supervised PA with the addition of a behavioral counseling component. This rigorous comparison condition will provide further evidence that theoretically-informed interventions are needed to adopt long-term PA maintenance.

The program's supervised exercise length will be 6 weeks, followed by a tapered contact throughout the a 6-week home-based component through 'booster' behavioral counseling delivered via telephone. In terms of study measures, objective measures of PA will be used (i.e.,accelerometry, inclinometers), and cardiorespiratory fitness will be evaluated using maximal graded exercise testing via treadmill. Additional secondary outcomes include cognitive function, quality of life, physical function, body composition, motivational outcomes, sexual functioning, masculinity, sedentary behavior, and cardiorespiratory fitness.

Inclusion criteria

• ≥18 years and older
• Histologically confirmed prostate cancer (Stage I-IIIa) but now cured or in remission
• Ability and willingness to effectively communicate in English
• Not meeting physical activity guidelines of ≥150 minutes of vigorous physical activity

Exclusion criteria

• Severe coronary artery disease (Canadian Cardiovascular Society class III or greater)
• Significant congestive heart failure (New York Heart Association class III or greater)
• Uncontrolled pain
• Neurological or musculoskeletal co-morbidity inhibiting exercise
• Diagnosed psychotic, addictive or major cognitive disorders
• Absent for more than 3 consecutive days during the 12-week intervention
• High risk individuals (i.e., men who have symptomatic and known cardiovascular, pulmonary and/or metabolic disease) as determined by the risk stratification questionnaire