Engaging in regular physical activity has been an important strategy in helping cancer survivors improve their physical and mental health. However, doing enough physical activity to reap the benefits has been challenging in the best of times. With COVID-19, the barriers to physical activity have been raised even higher, leading to even less participation from this population.
“Not only do their weakened immune systems put them at a greater risk for severe outcomes from COVID-19, the symptoms normally associated with a cancer diagnosis such as increased fatigue and stress may be amplified due to the pandemic,” says Allyson Tabaczynski, a PhD student of kinesiology at the University of Toronto.
“While there are many useful resources for cancer survivors available, they were developed prior to the start of pandemic. To design effective interventions and resources for cancer survivors as the pandemic progresses, we need to understand their unique experiences since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak.”
With help from U of T’s COVID-19 Student Engagement Award, that’s exactly what Tabaczynski will be doing, along with fellow kinesiology students Alexis Whitehorn and Denise Bastas. All three are part of The Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education Exercise Oncology Lab, led by Assistant Professor Linda Trinh.
“With 18 million people living with cancer in the world today, understanding and improving the health and well-being of this population is of global importance,” says Trinh. “COVID-19 has placed a high burden on healthcare systems all over the world. The self-management of health, when possible, through well-established benefits of physical activity can help alleviate some of this burden.”
Tabaczynski, Whitehorn and Bastas have developed an online survey, which will be disseminated to cancer survivors around the world, asking them a series of questions about their cancer diagnosis, individual and government mandated COVID-19 prevention measures that have been enacted in their parts of the world, their quality of life, cognitive functioning, and overall mental and physical health. The survey will also ask about their current lifestyle behaviours such as physical activity levels versus sedentary behaviours, and how these have changed since the start of the pandemic.
“We are looking to understand what their attitudes and barriers are towards performing physical activity during the pandemic, what resources they have to stay active, as well as how conducive their home and immediate neighbourhood environments are to performing physical activity,” says Whitehorn, who will be continuing her graduate studies of kinesiology as a doctoral student in Trinh’s lab come September. ”This will enable us to get a preliminary understanding of the health impact of COVID-19 and identify specific areas that need attention for effective health promotion across cultural and contextual circumstances.”
The students point out that physical activity is a developed habit that is largely influenced by individual, social and environmental factors, all of which were upended when the COVID-19 pandemic started.
“As a group, we noticed that our own relationship with physical activity had changed now that we were practicing physical distancing, but as physical activity researchers we were well equipped to adapt our own physical activity to this new reality. Other populations may not be so well equipped,” says Bastas, who will be starting her second year of a master’s degree in kinesiology in September.
Cancer survivors, for example, report numerous barriers to regular physical activity participation. They may need to take extra precautions and enact more strict physical distancing or isolation measures, and it is probable that the resources they would typically use to facilitate physical activity are limited or completely inaccessible.
“We found it to be of the utmost importance to understand how these behaviours changed as a result of COVID-19, the resources they have available to be active during this time and how participation at this unique time might relate to survivors’ mental health,” says Bastas.
Watch this short video featuring KPE Assistant Professor Linda Trinh on how being physically active can help prevent and treat kidney cancer.