Get strong to fight childhood cancer: an exercise intervention for children and adolescents undergoing anti-cancer treatment

Cancer is the first leading cause of death by non-communicable diseases in children in Europe.

During cancer treatment, patients morbidity is increased due to physical inactivity, cancer-related fatigue (CRF) and reduced health-related quality of life (HRQoL).

Adapted exercise training in cancer patients, called exercise oncology, is an increasingly recognised, promising health care intervention. In adults, exercise oncology revealed notable effects on tolerance and completion rate of cancer treatment. However, in childhood cancer patients, strong evidence for exercise efficiency is lacking.

Thus, precision exercise training is not part of standard care in paediatric oncology and does not reach the majority of patients.

By pooling the leading expertise on a European and cross-Atlantic level, the FORTEe project aims to evaluate a personalised and standardised exercise intervention for children and adolescents undergoing anti-cancer treatment.

In the randomised, controlled FORTEe trial, high evidence for an innovative, patient-centred exercise treatment will be generated. FORTEe promotes exercise oncology that aims at making patients stronger to fight childhood cancer. Supervised exercise training intents to increase muscle strength and reduce muscular atrophy due to bedrest.

CRF and HRQoL can be improved and in the future, these benefits may help to fight childhood cancer by increasing therapy efficiency and survival rate.

Within the project, digital, innovative technologies such as augmented reality will be developed and applied to make the exercise training more effective, age-adapted and personalised.

Moreover, FORTEe will stimulate translational research to provide access to paediatric exercise oncology as a new health care intervention.

As a progress beyond the current state-of-the-art, FORTEe has the ambition to implement paediatric exercise oncology as an evidence-based standard in clinical care for all childhood cancer patients across the EU and beyond.