Winter 2025
By Kathy Clute
Photography by Sam Ogden
How can exercise and diet improve the cognitive and physical abilities of cancer survivors 65 and older? Can artificial intelligence tools analyze clinical notes and other data in electronic medical records to determine which treatments are most effective?
Christina Dieli-Conwright, PhD, MPH, is a clinical exercise physiologist and the principal investigator (PI) in a 5-year collaboration with the University of Miami to determine whether older cancer survivors and their support persons can improve their cognitive and physical functioning through targeted lifestyle interventions.
Dieli-Conwright and her team are offering supervised and unsupervised home-based exercise and diet programs to 764 older cancer survivors and their primary caregivers, who are most often spouses or other family members. The participants are 65 or older and racially and ethnically diverse. One group will receive “gold standard” virtual aerobic and resistance exercise led by a certified trainer as well as virtual coaching by a registered dietician to promote adherence to a healthy Mediterranean diet that emphasizes fruits and vegetables, unsaturated fats, and less processed food.
The second group will be given the same diet recommendations and exercise intervention and equipment but will not receive the virtual coaching.
“There will be more than 26.1 million cancer survivors by 2040, and three quarters of them will be 65 or older—many with treatment-related side effects that affect their physical and cognitive functioning,” said Dieli-Conwright. “We also know that support persons tend to be less healthy than their peers who do not have caregiving responsibilities. We want to see which intervention we are testing is most successful in promoting a better quality of life for both populations.”
Kenneth Kehl, MD, MPH, is a thoracic oncologist and a researcher in Dana-Farber Cancer Institute’s Division of Population Sciences. He is PI on a project to improve outcomes for patients by developing machine-learning techniques to extract data on disease progression, treatments, and outcomes from the electronic health records (EHRs) of more than 150,000 patients with advanced cancer. “This will make it possible to compare treatments that may be widely deployed but that don’t attract the resources necessary for randomized controlled trials,” said Kehl.
Both studies are supported by funding from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, a nonprofit organization with a mission to fund research designed to provide patients, caregivers, and clinicians with the evidence-based information they need to make better-informed health and health care decisions.