Although therapies for prostate cancer increase patients' survival rate, specific therapies (e.g. androgen deprivation therapy; ADT) are often associated with psychological and physiological side effects that negatively impact on patients' quality of life (QoL). The aim of this pilot study was to examine the effect of progressive resistance training (PRT) as an adjunct therapy to minimize these side effects. The present abstract focuses on the psychological results of the study.
Methods: Ten PC patients on ADTwere recruited and randomly allocated to either 12 weeks of PRT (training group TG, n=5) or standard treatment (control group CG, n=5). The FACT-P was used to measure QoL, the bidimensional fatigue scale (BFS) to measure fatigue, and the HADS to measure anxiety and depression.
Results: One subject in the TG was diagnosed with bone metastases, and for safety reasons was withdrawn from the study. Mann-Whitney U tests were employed to assess the difference in change scores (pre-post intervention) between groups. The results revealed a 5.3 point increase in the FACT-P scores for the exercise group and a 10.4 point decrease for the control group (p=.19). Similar trends were revealed for the BFS and HADS results. Of note is the fact that the anxiety of the control group reached a clinically defined "mild level" of anxiety.
Conclusions: The trends in the data suggest that PRT is an effective adjunct therapy for reducing the negative psychological side effects of ADT, these results await confirmation in a larger randomised (attention) controlled trial.