Exploring the impact of exercise and mind-body prehabilitation interventions on physical and psychological outcomes in women undergoing breast cancer surgery.

PURPOSE: To compare the impact of exercise and mind-body prehabilitation interventions on changes in quality of life and cancer treatment-related symptoms in women with newly diagnosed breast cancer. METHODS: The following describes a secondary analysis of a randomized window of opportunity trial (The Pre-Operative Health and Body Study). Forty-nine women were randomized to participate in either an exercise prehabilitation intervention or a mind-body prehabilitation intervention from the time of enrollment to surgery. Participants (N = 47) completed measures of quality of life, anxiety, depression, and stress at the time of enrollment (T1), post-intervention/surgery (T2), and one-month post-surgery (T3). Changes in outcome measures between groups were compared over time using longitudinal models. RESULTS: Mind-body group participants experienced significant improvements in cognitive functioning in comparison to exercise group participants between T1 and T3 (difference in average change: -9.61, p = 0.04, d = 0.31), otherwise, there were no significant differences between groups. Within group comparisons demonstrated that both groups experienced improvements in anxiety (exercise: average change = -1.18, p = 0.03, d = 0.34; mind-body: average change = -1.69, p = 0.006, d = 0.43) and stress (exercise: average change = -2.33, p = 0.04, d = 0.30; mind-body: average change = -2.59, p = 0.05, d = 0.29), while mind-body group participants experienced improvements in insomnia (average change = -10.03, p = 0.04, d = 0.30) and cognitive functioning (average change = 13.16, p = 0.0003, d = 0.67). CONCLUSIONS: Both prehabilitation interventions impacted cancer treatment-related symptoms. Further work in larger groups of patients is needed to evaluate the efficacy of prehabilitation interventions on quality of life in women with breast cancer. Pre-operative exercise and mind-body interventions may impact physical and/or psychological effects of cancer diagnosis and treatment in women with breast cancer. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT01516190. Registered January 24, 2012.

Neoadjuvant bevacizumab: surgical complications of mastectomy with and without reconstruction.

Neoadjuvant therapy (NAC) is commonly used in operable breast cancer. Previous studies have suggested a high rate of postoperative complications after NAC. We prospectively evaluated the surgical complications in a cohort of patients who underwent mastectomy following neoadjuvant adriamycin/cytoxan/taxol (AC/T) plus bevacizumab (bev) and compared the rate of complications to a matched cohort of neoadjuvant AC/T without bev. One hundred patients with HER2-negative breast cancer enrolled in a single-arm trial of neoadjuvant AC/T plus bev (cohort 1), 60 of these patients underwent mastectomy and were matched with 59 patients who received standard neoadjuvant AC/T (cohort 2) over a similar time period in the same healthcare system. All patients underwent mastectomy with or without reconstruction. Fisher's exact tests were used to compare complication rates, with p < 0.05 considered significant. Patients were matched well in terms of demographics. The overall complication rate was 32 % in cohort 1 and 31 % in cohort 2 (p value = 1, Table 1). In cohort 1, 7 of 23 (30 %) patients who underwent immediate expander/implant reconstruction had complications, including 2 patients who had explantation of their reconstructions. In cohort 2, 0 of 8 (0 %) had complications (p value = 0.15). Nearly a third of patients undergoing NAC with AC/T with or without bev developed a postoperative complication after mastectomy. The use of bev was not associated with a significant increase in surgical complications, although this is a nonrandomized data set with a small sample size. As larger data sets become available with the use of neoadjuvant bevacizumab with mastectomy, further refinement may be necessary.