Can Exercise During Eye Cancer Treatment Help You Stay Healthier?

In Plain English

This study is testing whether doing resistance exercises (like using stretchy bands to build strength) during your hospital stay for eye cancer treatment can help your body stay healthier. You'll be in the hospital for 5-7 days while you receive plaque brachytherapy (a type of radiation treatment for uveal melanoma). During that time, you'll be isolated in your room, but instead of just resting, half of the patients in this study will do about 30 minutes of guided exercise each day using elastic resistance bands, while the other half will follow the hospital's normal routine. The researchers want to see if this exercise helps improve your blood health markers, physical strength, mood, and overall quality of life—both right after treatment and one month later. A trained doctor will supervise all the exercises and adjust the difficulty based on how hard you're working. The goal is simple: to find out if staying active during a tough week of treatment can actually help your body recover better.

What This Trial Does

Choroidal melanoma (CM) is one of the most common intraocular cancers worldwide. During treatment with episcleral brachytherapy, patients require a week of hospitalization in isolation. The primary aim of this study will be to investigate the effects of resistance training during hospitalization on health-related blood biomarkers in CM patients. Our secondary aim will be to assess changes in physical function tests, quality of life and anxiety and depression. Candidates for this study will be patients undergoing CM treatment at the "Hospital Universitari i Politècnic La Fe" of Valencia.

How It Works

Candidates of the present study will be adults with CM diagnose and treated with plaque brachytherapy undergoing in "Hospital Universitari i Politècnic La Fe" (Valencia). All the participants will be informed about the objectives and content of the investigation and written informed consent will be obtained. Participants will be excluded if they (1) present a health status that forbids high intensity resistance training, (2) have any unsteady cardiac illness, (3) have serious metabolic disorder or if (4) they have any important orthopaedic disorder impeding exercise. The study will conform to the Declaration of Helsinki and will be approved by the Ethical Committee of "Hospital Universitari i Politècnic de La Fe". A randomized controlled trial with two parallel groups is planned: a control group following the hospital's standard protocol (usual care) and an intervention group in which patients will complete a daily resistance training session during hospitalization. During the 5-7 days of treatment, where participants are going to be isolated in a room without human contact, are going to perform a daily session of exercise during about 30 minutes. The exercises will be supervised by a trained physician. To carry out the training session, elastic resistance bands will be used. On each day, each exercise will start with 3 sets of two repetitions as a warm-up and to calculate the appropriate intensity. The intensity will be that at which the patient reports a perceived exertion of 5-6 of 10 at the Borg CR10 scale after two repetitions. For each exercise, one set will be completed until task failure is achieved.If in any of the exercises the patient perceives this intensity only with the weight of his own limb or body weight, the exercise will be performed without elastic bands. To observe the effects of the intervention, various blood tests, functional, quality-of-life and anxiety and depression assessments will be conducted before and after the program, as well as one-month post-hospital discharge.

Who Can Join

Treatments