Tag Archive for: lifestyle changes

Survivorship Care: Screening and Lifestyle Strategies to Reduce the Risk of Secondary Cancers

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What are key lifestyle changes for cancer patients navigating treatment and recovery? Expert Dr. Amy Comander from Massachusetts General Hospital discusses survivorship care and lifestyle advice for coping with and recovering from cancer treatment.

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Transcript:

Lisa Hatfield:

Navigating cancer treatment and recovery is a journey that involves more than just medical care. Lifestyle choices play a crucial role too. What other factors play into this journey? I’m getting to the bottom of it with a respected oncologist in this Patient Empowerment Network RESTORE program. 

Dr. Comander, many patients often worry about secondary cancers. What are key lifestyle changes you recommend for cancer prevention and how do they differ from those recommended for post-cure recovery or post-treatment?

Dr. Amy Comander:

So an important component of survivorship care, which is care of the patient, certainly at the time of diagnosis and beyond, but in that follow-up phase as well, is screening for secondary cancers. And what does that mean? That means that a cancer that can develop after the diagnosis of the primary cancer. And I know to some listening that sounds really overwhelming. “You mean I can get another cancer?” But unfortunately, none of us have a crystal ball and that could happen. So what are strategies we can use to help reduce the risk of someone getting another cancer down the road?

And I first want to emphasize the importance of cancer screening. So we now have all these great tools for cancer screening; mammograms, breast MRIs, colonoscopy, pap smears, pelvic exams, CT scans for detection of lung cancer, and now we’re having these blood tests that we’re going to learn more about in the next few years. So there’s many screening strategies that are super important. So I encourage my patients to talk to their doctor. About making sure they’re staying on top of that because, my patients who I see in breast cancer follow-up, I always ask them, “When was your last colonoscopy?” And nobody loves getting that, but it’s really important as our major strategy for screening for colon cancer.

In terms of lifestyle recommendations, we know that a lot of the lifestyle recommendations that we talk about with our patients to improve their health during the survivorship phase of their care are also associated with a reduced risk of getting another type of cancer. So we know that physical activity is very beneficial to reduce the risk of many cancers, including breast cancer, colon cancer, and others. We know that being at a healthy body weight is really important in terms of thinking about risk for a future cancer. Again, a healthy diet with a focus of lots of whole grains, fruits, and vegetables is also so important.

So I think all the lifestyle strategies that we’ve really emphasized for cancer survivorship are also really important to optimize health, to reduce the risk of a secondary cancer and other chronic diseases, which I do have to mention, such as heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes. All of these things can happen too, because they can happen to all of us here. So we need to think about how can we optimize our health to reduce the risk of all of these potential conditions.

Lisa Hatfield:

Thank you. You heard it here from Dr. Amy Comander. Thanks for joining this RESTORE Program. I’m your host, Lisa Hatfield.

Making Lifestyle Changes When Living With an MPN

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Making Lifestyle Changes When Living With an MPN from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.

 As a myelofibrosis (MF) and essential thrombocythemia (ET) patient, Julia Olff has experienced lifestyle changes in her MPN journey. Watch as she shares changes she made with her work life and eating habits and the impact on her well-being as an MPN patient.

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Transcript:

Julia Olff:

I’ve definitely made many lifestyle changes since I’ve been diagnosed with ET and then myelofibrosis. The biggest change came when I needed to give up full-time work and began to work on a very part-time basis, so that’s been the most monumental change, and it really came about because of how unwell I was feeling, how much pain I was going through at the time, I also had a mini-stroke and became more involved in is hospitalized that I needed more treatment than I was seeing more…more specialists for a short period of time, and my husband and I recognized that to maintain my well-being, I needed to step off of the 50-hour week plus travel job that I was doing, so that was a really big change and that continues to influence my life, however, I’ve found a lot of positives in that I’m fortunate that I’ve been able to financially sustain my life while working part-time and find other aspects of my life that are fulfilling. For example, I volunteer a lot more. I’ve made changes in the way that I eat and the way that I sleep, so myelofibrosis has certainly caused a lot more fatigue over the years. And while when I was working full-time, I don’t think I was getting the amount of sleep that I really needed, and fatigue started to really weigh on me, and I remember driving and just feeling like, “Oh my God, I can’t do this,” so I make sure that I go to bed much earlier than I used to and try to wake up about the same time every day, and it’s also helped with some of the insomnia that I know people with myelofibrosis on the flip side, have with the fatigue. I’ve been hospitalized a few times for colitis, and there are all sorts of potential for bleeding with myelofibrosis, and we’re not sure that that was related, but I learned that I needed to change the way I was eating, and I can’t say that I did it immediately.

It took seeing a gastroenterologist, who evaluated all of my records and several more colonoscopies to get and the terrible, terrible pain of colitis to realize I needed to change the way I was eating, and I also had some weight gain with one of the medications that I was on…and so I enrolled in Weight Watchers, which I found to be incredibly helpful to help me lose some weight and did help me pump up the fruits and vegetables in my diet, especially when I learned you can eat lots of those…but less of other things. So those are some of the changes. And the last one I say is really learning to pace myself and to not overdo it, and that’s a longer learning process, I think, and figuring out that you don’t have the same kind of energy that you had pre-illness, where you can kind of push your day…you can do one more thing, one to one more place, add one more task to do is when you’re out, I’m much more of a planner, and I allow myself much more time to get things done, and I spread them out over several days, what I might have done in one day in the past.  

MPN Patient Q&A: What Lifestyle Changes Did You Make?

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MPN Patient Q&A: What Lifestyle Changes Did You Make? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.

Should myeloproliferative neoplasm (MPN) patients make lifestyle changes after diagnosis? Watch as MPN patient Nona explains lifestyle changes she made following diagnosis to improve her quality of life.  

This program provides one patient’s perspective. Please talk to your own doctor to make healthcare decisions that are right for you. 

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Transcript:

Dr. Nicole Rochester:

All right, we have a question from James. James says, “Are there specific lifestyle changes that you may, following your diagnosis that brought relief to any symptoms that you were having?”

Nona Baker:

Well, the first change I had to me was I used to smoke, and then my hematologist said to me that affects the red cell count, and that was the incentive to absolutely give up smoking there, and then that was my first lifestyle change, and I haven’t regretted it for a single day. Other lifestyle changes, not really, other than just becoming aware that you know to fight fatigue doesn’t help, sometimes you have to surrender to it, but definitely give up smoking and I… you know, I think that…well, nowadays people don’t smoke, but we’re talking 30 years ago, so…yeah, study is pretty well since I have a cigarette.