As innovative treatments have improved outcomes in multiple myeloma, patients now live longer and look to get back to a similar quality of life they enjoyed before their diagnosis. Chief of Myeloma and Professor of Oncology and Internal Medicine, Jens Hillengass, MD, PhD, along with researchers at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, are looking at ways that different lifestyle interventions can provide multiple myeloma patients a safe way to get back to their day-to-day life.
Hello. My name is john Zynga's. I'm the chief of Myeloma at Russell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo new york. My Thoughts about lifestyle interventions started 10 years ago when patients started to approach me either when they are newly diagnosed or when they're in remission of their disease and feel better. But they asked what else can I do? Because they think about things or they go online and then they see stuff about food, about what to eat, what not to eat, what diet to take. One thing that is very prevalent. A lot of patients ask me can I go back to the gym or can I go back golfing? Can I go back to whatever they have done before we look into how can diet have a positive impact on the effect of treatment of the tolerable Itty of treatment and also on the quality of life for patients. Obviously there's some data that certain diets or certain actually fasting regiments might have a beneficial effect on the immune system and a lot of the treatments that we are doing in myeloma are engaging the immune system, the healthy part of the immune system to attack the cancer cells. And the same is true for physical activity exercise. Myeloma patients have as a hallmark of the disease, Australia, ticklish ins meaning holds in their bones with an elevated risk of fracture. A longtime patients were told don't do anything but patients feel good they their bones improve actually we see that with our new treatments and now they want to go back to the gym. I want to work out but we don't dare to do that unsupervised at the moment just because there's not a lot of scientific data out there. So at Roswell Park we have a clinical trial that we have have as a pilot to see if it's even feasible to offer exercise to patients. We started that before Covid and we brought patients in into our rehab department to do actually like work out every twice a week for um The plan is for six months within a clinical trial we do analysis questionnaires of quality of life of pain of some side effects of treatment like pollen neuropathy or peripheral neuropathy which is a rather common side effect in myeloma treatment. And we measured that before, after three months and after six months and we also measure immune function. We measure immune markers in the blood to see how they change While those patients are working out. Not everyone can come to Roswell downtown every time or twice a week. And so we offer to other patients so called um Fitbit prompts. We call it which counts their steps and the active minutes and they can upload their Fitbit data to our patient portal. And we see how the improvement of their activity. How more active minutes per week will hopefully help them to improve immune markers to improve quality of life. The goal at the moment. That's recommended by the American College of Sports Medicine is 150-300 active minutes Per week. And this is our goal as well. We try to bring our patients to these 300 minutes. Some patients cannot do that, which is not a surprise, but we try to help them to improve based on their baseline. So we have our program online on the Roswell website. Um you can reach out to us and ask how to enroll. We hope that we can start that within the next few months.
BROADCASTMED