Five-year follow-up of the OptiTrain trial on concurrent resistance and high-intensity interval training during chemotherapy for patients with breast cancer
Question
Do the effects of 16 weeks of supervised RT-HIIT or AT-HIIT during adjuvant breast cancer chemotherapy persist 5 years after baseline for fatigue, quality of life, symptoms, fitness, strength, pain sensitivity, physical activity, sedentary behavior, body mass, and cognition?
Summary
This paper reports the 5-year follow-up of the OptiTrain randomized trial in women with breast cancer who did supervised exercise during chemotherapy. The original 16-week intervention compared resistance training plus HIIT, aerobic training plus HIIT, and usual care. At 5 years, total cancer-related fatigue was not significantly different between exercise and usual-care groups. RT-HIIT showed a significant advantage for gluteal pressure pain threshold, while lower-body strength and cardiorespiratory-fitness differences were clinically meaningful but not statistically significant. The paper emphasizes that short-term benefits from exercise during treatment may fade without ongoing support for physical activity.
Methodology
- Women with early breast cancer undergoing adjuvant chemotherapy.
- 206 participants.
- Cycle ergometer HIIT combined with resistance training or moderate aerobic exercise.
- Work intervals: 3 minutes.
- Recovery: 1 minute.
- Intensity: RPE 16-18 for HIIT.
- About 60 minutes.
- 2 sessions/week.
- 16 weeks.
- Five-year follow-up of a prospective three-arm randomized controlled trial.
- Cancer-related fatigue, Health-related quality of life and symptoms, Cardiorespiratory fitness, and Strength and pressure pain threshold were tracked.
Outcomes
Cancer-related fatigue
No statistically significant or clinically meaningful 5-year differences in total cancer-related fatigue versus usual care.
RT-HIIT vs UC MD -0.02, 95% CI -1.50 to 1.46; AT-HIIT vs UC MD 0.14, 95% CI -1.34 to 1.62.
Pressure pain threshold
RT-HIIT showed significantly better gluteal pressure pain threshold than usual care.
RT-HIIT vs UC MD 79.00, 95% CI 10.17 to 147.83, ES 0.55.
Fitness and strength
Clinically meaningful differences were observed for AT-HIIT cardiorespiratory fitness and RT-HIIT lower-body strength, but without statistical significance.
Estimated VO2peak AT-HIIT vs UC MD 1.62 mL/kg/min, 95% CI -3.57 to 6.82; lower-body strength RT-HIIT vs UC MD 10.28 kg, 95% CI -2.83 to 23.40.
Physical activity
No significant between-group differences in physical activity at 5 years, and physical activity levels declined over time.
MVPA RT-HIIT vs UC MD 3.00 min/week, 95% CI -18.12 to 24.12; AT-HIIT vs UC MD -0.38, 95% CI -21.83 to 21.07.
Insights
- Long-term follow-up can invalidate or heavily qualify short-term HIIT claims.
- Combining HIIT with strength or aerobic work may create durable function signals, but maintenance support is needed.
- For public research pages, separate original intervention outcomes from 5-year follow-up outcomes.
Limitations
- High attrition by 5 years.
- HIIT was bundled with resistance or moderate aerobic exercise.
- Several favorable differences were clinically meaningful but not statistically significant.
- Clinical oncology context limits consumer translation.
Safety
- This follow-up extraction did not identify a specific adverse-event summary for the original intervention.
- All original sessions were supervised by exercise physiologist or oncology nurse.
- Findings should not be translated into unsupervised chemotherapy HIIT guidance.