ABSTRACT
An increasing proportion of people ever diagnosed with invasive cancer will live 5 years or more after their cancer diagnosis. For them, the clinical focus has been shifting from a focus on extending recurrence-free survival to a focus on improving the survivor’s quality of life. Fortunately, increasingly sophisticated behavior change research is equipping healthcare providers with patient behavior change strategies and providing cancer survivors with practical steps that can optimize cancer survivors’ physical well-being and quality of life. Although different cancer diagnoses require somewhat different lifestyle prescriptions to optimize the survivor’s quality of life, a variety of cancer diagnoses respond well to lifestyle interventions that promote greater adherence to federal nutrition and physical activity guidelines for all Americans. More specifically, cancer survivors experience higher quality of life by eating a more Mediterranean-style diet and by engaging in a 30-minute brisk walk at least 5 days a week for reasons that probably involve salubrious impacts on their gut microbiota composition. Behavior change approaches to promoting healthier lifestyle behaviors in cancer survivors can be cancer-specific or originally designed for the general population. Either way, research in which behavior theory-specific components are exhaustively embedded yield greater impact than research that is merely theory-informed. Selected theories are discussed with illustrations taken from recent scientific literature. Which behavioral approaches are most appropriate depends on the progress with which the cancer survivor has embedded the desired behaviors into their everyday routines as well as on supports for the recommended behaviors by family and community members. The most appropriate behavioral approaches are also, of course, conditioned on the survivor’s demographic, physical, and emotional health status characteristics. Finally, we present several recommendations for accelerating progress in the use of behavior change interventions to optimize cancer survivors’ recurrence-free survival and quality of life.
