Four Months of Exercise Intervention Improved Visuomotor, Functional and Cardiorespiratory Capacity in a Patient with...

Background and Clinical Significance: Uveal melanoma (UM) is an ocular malignancy with high mortality for which supportive therapies to mitigate disease and treatment-related side effects are lacking. Exercise therapy is one of the most versatile symptom-management strategies in oncology. We investigated the effects of a 4-month combined exercise intervention to restore and stabilize disease and treatment-related side effects. Case Presentation: A moderately active 61-year-old woman, diagnosed with metastatic UM in the right eye and treated with Cyberknife radiation, presented with diminished visual motor capacity due to disease-related loss of stereopsis and visual field reduction, without systemic comorbidities. The main outcome measures were visuomotor and functional tests (VFT) and cardio-pulmonary exercise testing (CEPT). All functional and most visuomotor tests demonstrated meaningful improvements between baseline and post-intervention by 7-128% and 8-24%, respectively. The CPET-derived parameters (% for VE˙, VO˙2, PPO, CEPT duration) showed improvements between 10 and 30% throughout the 4-month period. Conclusions: Data from this case report indicate that the 4-month exercise intervention yielded a consistent pattern of improvement in most VFT dimensions and cardio-pulmonary capacity. Interestingly, our data imply that post-radiation declines in visuomotor capacity recovered and expanded with enhanced manual dexterity. Future investigations need to extend our findings to a larger cohort of UM patients.