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Exercise Benefits Women With Advanced Breast Cancer, Experts Say
- November 7, 2025
- Dennis Thompson HealthDay Reporter
Exercise can help women with advanced breast cancer better withstand both cancer treatments and the ravages of the disease, a new clinical trial shows.
A nine-month program of supervised aerobic and resistant exercise improved muscle mass and strength among women with advanced breast cancer, particularly in their arms and legs, researchers found.
The women put on nearly 2 pounds of additional muscle mass within the first three months, compared to a control group that didn’t have exercise classes, researchers found.
While muscle mass did decline over time, the women still had just under a pound of extra muscle after six months compared to the control group, researchers added.
“The results from our study are important since lean body mass is linked to better treatment tolerance, prognosis and overall health, and increased muscle strength correlates with improved quality of life and lower mortality risk,” said researcher Anne May, a professor of clinical epidemiology of cancer survivorship at the University Medical Center Utrecht in The Netherlands.
“This supports the call for exercise, and specifically supervised exercise with a resistance exercise component, to be integrated as a standard component of cancer care for patients with metastatic breast cancer,” May added in a news release.
For the study, researchers recruited 357 patients with stage 4 breast cancer between 2019 and 2022. The women were being treated in hospitals in Germany, Poland, Spain, Sweden and The Netherlands.
Half were put into a nine-month exercise program, consisting of aerobic, strength and balance training. A trainer worked with them twice a week for six months; in the last three months, patients had one session with a trainer and one unsupervised session.
“We found that exercise significantly improved physical performance, including balance and muscle strength at three and six months,” May said.
Balance was particularly important, given that 74% of the patients had cancer that had spread into their bones, May said.
“Low muscle mass and strength are associated with balance problems, which can be exacerbated further by therapy-induced damage to the nerves in hands and feet, and increases the risk of falls,” May said.
Fall prevention is particularly important because patients whose cancer has reached the bones are at increased fracture risk, she pointed out.
“One patient, who had balance problems, was not able to get on and off a bus at the start of the study,” May said. “After being included in the supervised exercise group, that problem was solved, and now she can use the bus again. This means for her that she can again visit the city center and the library.”
May presented her findings Friday at the Advanced Breast Cancer Eighth International Consensus Conference in Lisbon.
The organizer of the conference, the Advanced Breast Cancer Global Alliance, plans to launch a Physical Activity Resource Hub in early 2026. The site will contain videos, exercise guides and links to external resources for patients with different levels of breast cancer and differing levels of fitness.
“We all know how important exercise is – for quality of life and perhaps even prognosis,” advanced breast cancer patient Eva Schumacher-Wulf, editor-in-chief of the German cancer magazine Mamma Mia!, said in a news release.
“However, people with advanced cancer have special needs, and not every exercise programmed is feasible or suitable,” continued Schumacher-Wulf, a member of the working group developing the ABC Global Alliance’s exercise hub. “That is why targeted exercise programs are so important for these patients.”
Findings presented at medical meetings should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.
More information
The National Cancer Center has more on physical activity and cancer.
SOURCE: Advanced Breast Cancer Eighth International Consensus Conference, news release, Nov. 6, 2025
