Weight management appears to improve quality of life in patients with prostate cancer

In this video, Jill M. Hamilton Reeves, PhD, RD, CSO, discusses whether findings from the Journal of Urology paper “Impact of Weight Management on Obesity-Driven Biomarkers of Prostate Cancer Progression” will affect her patient counseling. Hamilton-Reeves is an associate professor of dietetics and nutrition at the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City.

Transcription:

Will these findings affect your patient counseling in any way?

I think these findings are a little early to say that weight loss would reduce the risk of prostate cancer progression because we don't have that hard outcome yet. I would say that the biomarkers are going in the right direction, so I think we can feel a little more confident that making these healthy lifestyle changes could point you in a trajectory for a better place. And to me, the most compelling outcome is really the quality-of-life outcomes. General quality of life as well as emotional quality of life improved in the intervention group significantly. That was different from the control group. To me, and being around these guys and hearing their morale and how things changed in that way, to me, that feels like something that's actionable, because there's so much that's out of our control when we put ourselves into the health care system and at the mercy of a wonderful clinical care team, there's so many things out of our control, and feeling some agency and autonomy to really focus on our health when it feels like maybe our body might be betraying us with having cancer. But we know we're actually making choices that are making our heart healthier, making emotional health and mental health more resilient, and doing the small part that we can to help keep cancer from coming back. To me, that's kind of the piece that I'm hoping we can launch forward on for seeing if there's more that we can do to support these patients during this time. And then also, keep learning from the science coming out as far as how making these changes to energy balance affects the cancer itself, or affects the ability of the cancer to spread.

This transcription was edited for clarity.