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UBC Theses and Dissertations

Exercise counselling to promote exercise behaviour change in individuals with prostate cancer Weller, Sarah Krystal

Abstract

Exercise has been shown to be an effective strategy to enhance survivorship and improve quality of life in individuals with prostate cancer. However, the majority of men with prostate cancer do not meet the exercise guidelines for cancer survivors that recommend achieving a minimum of 150-minutes of moderate-to-vigorous aerobic exercise and two resistance exercise sessions weekly. To assist in the adoption and maintenance of exercise behaviours, the Prostate Cancer Supportive Care (PCSC) program implemented an exercise clinic that included group education and individualized exercise counselling delivered by an exercise physiologist. The primary aim of this dissertation was to evaluate the feasibility of the delivery of the exercise clinic and to understand the preliminary effect of this clinic at changing exercise behaviours over a 3-month period. A retrospective chart review was performed on data collected from attendees of the PCSC Program Exercise Clinic version 2.0 protocol from June 11 2018 to April 10 2019 from four appointment sessions: Education session, exercise clinic session 1 (first in-person exercise clinic session), exercise clinic session 2 (telephone follow-up session) and exercise clinic session 3 (3-month in-person follow-up session). Feasibility was defined a priori and measured by attendance, attrition, session timing, intervention delivery fidelity and intervention component fidelity. Self-reported aerobic and resistance exercise levels were evaluated at each session. The results show that this study exceeded feasibility targets for attendance, attrition, intervention fidelity and in-person session timing. There was intervention component fidelity in 38 of 39 components. Aerobic exercise levels at 3-months had increased by 83198 minutes per week of moderate-to-vigorous aerobic exercise with a moderate effect (ES 0.54, 95% CI 0.3-0.5) and resistance exercise increased by 2.03.1 sessions per week with a large effect (ES 0.77, 95% CI 0.3-1.3). Overall, this intervention was feasible to deliver to individuals with prostate cancer in a real-world clinical setting by exercise physiologists. The exercise counselling intervention elicited a moderate effect, showing improvements in aerobic and resistance exercise levels across 3-months. Future work should explore if this behaviour change can be sustained longer-term.

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