When you are getting chemotherapy, exercise may be the last thing on your mind. Now, new research suggests it should be the first.
Exercising during chemotherapy is safe, improves long-term cardiac and respiratory function, and may help ease some of the ravages of treatment, Dutch researchers report. If you can’t exercise during chemotherapy, then you should start after treatment to get your heart function back to normal, they added.
“These findings suggest that the most optimal timing of physical exercise is during chemotherapy,” said senior study author Dr. Annemiek Walenkamp, a medical oncologist at the University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands….