Physical Exercise and Quality of Life of Patients Diagnosed with Colorectal Cancer: Systematic Literature Review

Colorectal cancer decrease quality of life, due to treatment and disease, and physical exercise can improve the quality of life of patients with cancer, but it is still uncertain whether physical exercise can improve quality of life in these patients.

To determine if there is an improvement in the quality of life in patients diagnosed with colorectal cancer undergoing physical exercise.

A systematic literature review was carried out; non-randomized clinical trials of any year were included from PubMed, Embase, Cochrane, and VHL platforms, without specific language delimitation, and analyzed the influence of physical exercise on the quality of life of patients diagnosed with colorectal cancer, and for analysis of bias, the Cochrane Manual for the Development of Systematic Intervention Reviews was used.

Four studies were analyzed in full to produce the results; of these, three intervened with unsupervised aerobic exercises and one with semi-supervised aerobic exercises, all used the FACT-C as a questionnaire to assess quality of life, some even used FACT-G and/or SF-12, and only one author found significance values in the variables of physical well-being, emotional well-being, and functional well-being of the questionnaire, compared with the control group.

There were no significant increases in the quality of life of patients diagnosed with colorectal cancer compared with the control group.