Projects

Project Lead Researcher: Stacey Reading PhD, CEPNZ-CEP

Additional Researchers & Students: Mahsa Zamani Boroujeni (PhD candidate), Mingming Xu (PhD candidate)

Funding Support: Hugh Green Foundation

More than 350 New Zealand women will be diagnosed with metastatic (also known as advanced or stage IV) breast cancer this year, joining the more than 800 women in Aotearoa living with this condition. Although medical treatments and access to newer medications have improved 5-year survivorship, metastatic breast cancer remains incurable. Cancer and cancer-related treatments can compromise the quality of survivorship by amplifying the symptoms associated with cancer-related fatigue. “Cancer-related fatigue is a distressing, persistent, subjective sense of physical, emotional and/or cognitive tiredness or exhaustion related to cancer or cancer treatment that is not proportional to recent activity and interferes with usual functioning” (Berger AM et al. 2015). Presently, there are no effective therapeutic solutions available to treat cancer-related fatigue; however, exercise is emerging as at least moderately effective for reducing symptom severity in those living with cancer-related fatigue.

The METs group is an exercise intervention for women living with incurable breast cancer. Based in the Health & Rehabilitation Clinic in the Department of Exercise Sciences at the University of Auckland, women living with metastatic breast cancer attend one or two group-based exercise sessions each week. Participants are partnered with postgraduate students studying Clinical Exercise Physiology to develop and undertake individualised exercise programming aligned with their aspirations, abilities and medical conditions. The partnership between participants, staff and students is fundamental to building a deeper understanding of the impact cancer and cancer-related fatigue have on people’s lives. It is also helping us to better understand cancer-related fatigue and how to better use exercise prescriptively to reduce the impact of cancer-related fatigue on daily life.

Currently, the METs group is helping us to understand how cancer and exposure to anthracycline chemotherapy alter cardiovascular and cardiometabolic function during exercise. We suspect that diminished capacity to deliver and utilise oxygen to support aerobic energy production contributes to cancer-related fatigue symptoms. We are also investigating the impact of cancer and cancer-related treatments on exercise behaviour and cognitive perception of exercise intensity. We suspect that equivalent physiological demands during exercise are perceived as more intense by those living with cancer. This may explain why standard exercise recommendations, such as obtaining 150 minutes per week of moderate-intensity exercise, are often ineffective in those living with metastatic breast cancer.