Exercise and Quality of Life in Head and Neck Cancer Patients
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Exercise is known to improve quality of life (QoL) in certain cancer survivor groups but there is limited research with head and neck cancer survivors. PURPOSE: To examine the prevalence of exercise in head and neck cancer survivors and determine any preliminary associations with QoL. METHODS: 59 of 64 (92%) eligible head and neck cancer survivors were recruited from an academic oncology clinic in the midwest United States. Participants completed a self-administered survey that included a modified Godin Leisure-Time Exercise Questionnaire and the Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy-Head & Neck (FACT-H&N) scale which consists of five subscales: physical well-being (PWB), social well-being (SWB), emotional well-being (EWB), functional well-being (FWB), and additional concerns (AC). PWB, FWB, EWB, and SWB can also be summed to form the FACT-General (FACT-G). Medical variables were obtained by medical record review. RESULTS: The majority of participants were men (83%) and Caucasian (92%) with mean age = 58 ± 12.8. Current smoking and drinking was reported by 25% and 34% of participants, respectively. Cancer site was primarily oral cavity (24%), oropharynx (37%), or larynx (25%) with 20% being stage I, 7% stage II, 19% stage III, and 54% stage IV disease. Chemotherapy and/or radiation were ongoing in 14%. Half (51%) were <6 months after diagnosis. Only 3 (5.1%) participants reported any vigorous exercise minutes (M = 7.3 ± 35.4) and only 7 (11.9%) reported any moderate exercise minutes (M = 19.5 ± 70.6). Light exercise was reported by 26 (44.1%) participants (M = 83.4 ± 147). Only 5 (8.5%) participants were meeting current public health exercise guidelines. Means and standard deviations for each QoL scale were: FACT-H&N (103.2 ± 26.5), FACT-G (74.9 ± 18.9), PWB (19.1 ± 7.6), SWB (21.4 ± 5.9), EWB (18.3 ± 4.5), FWB (16.0 ± 7.5), and AC (28.3 ± 9.4). Pearson correlations showed that total exercise minutes (i.e., light + moderate + vigorous) was significantly associated with PWB (r = 0.23; p = 0.089), FWB (r = 0.32, p = 0.015), FACT-G (r = 0.27, p = 0.043), and FACT-H&N (r = 0.26, p = 0.053) but not SWB (r = 0.03; p = 0.850), EWB (r = 0.17, p = 0.208), or AC (r = 0.19, 0.166). CONCLUSIONS: Few head and neck cancer survivors are participating in any moderate or vigorous exercise and over half are completely sedentary. Despite this limited variability in exercise behavior and a modest sample size, there were meaningful associations between total exercise minutes and physical and functional aspects of QoL. These data provide preliminary evidence that an exercise intervention may have utility in this understudied cancer survivor group but further research is warranted.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".