Pain, Fatigue Benefits May Give Resistance Training a Leg Up in Multiple Myeloma

A study presented at the American Society of Hematology annual meeting highlighted the benefits of supervised resistance training interventions in reducing fatigue and pain for multiple myeloma patients, with implications for enhancing supportive care.

In this exclusive MedPage Today video, Janine M. Joseph, MS, MBA, from Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, New York, discusses how structured exercise programs, particularly supervised resistance training, could reshape how physicians address fatigue and pain in multiple myeloma patients.

Following is a transcript of her remarks:

I presented a study about 6-month exercise interventions in multiple myeloma patients and how they were associated with changes in patient reported outcomes, specifically fatigue, pain, depression, and anxiety.

And we looked at a couple of different types of interventions. We looked at walking intervention, which is an unsupervised home-based walking intervention, and we looked at two different resistance training interventions. One was in-person supervised and one was remotely virtually supervised.

We found that, interestingly, there were no improvements in the home-based unsupervised walking cohort in these four measures, although that cohort did improve by other measures that we didn’t present today. But in terms of fatigue, pain, anxiety, and depression, there were no changes in the walking cohort. But in the supervised resistance training cohorts, we saw significant improvements during the intervention in pain and fatigue. And interestingly, the improvements in fatigue were lost after the intervention. So when you looked at these patients again 6 months later, they had returned largely to their baseline levels of fatigue after they stopped the participation in the program.

So it really was heartening to us in two ways because it shows that the interventions were helping the patients, or they were associated with beneficial outcomes in the patients. But the further evidence is provided by the fact that after the interventions were over, some of these states went back to baseline levels.

Moving forward, I think it’s really important to be able to demonstrate to these patients that structured exercise programs, specifically full-body resistance training interventions, could actually help them feel better on a daily basis. It’s one thing to say, well, we think it’s going to help your immune profile, we think it’s going to maybe help, it’s going to help your physical function, things like that. But then when they really feel differently on a daily basis, they feel less fatigue, less pain. These are things, tangible benefits that could maybe help them stick with these programs. Because we need them to stick with these programs because we do believe, we’ve seen evidence of immune profile changes for the better after participation in these programs as well, but that’s just a little less tangible to patients.

And so it’s good if doctors can say, you’re going to feel better, you’re going to have less pain, you’re going to have less fatigue. That’s something that maybe would encourage them to stick with these things.