NEW YORK: Just five per cent of US cancer survivors are meeting experts’ recommendations on diet, physical activity and cigarette smoking, a new survey shows.

But the more recommendations a cancer survivor did meet, the better his or her health-related quality of life (HRQoL), Dr Christopher Blanchard, of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, and colleagues found.

“It appears that meeting multiple lifestyle recommendations may not only be beneficial from a cancer recurrence/mortality perspective, but also from a HRQoL perspective,” they write in the May 1 issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

In 2006, the American Cancer Society issued three recommendations on healthy lifestyle behaviours for America’s more than 10 million cancer survivors: get at least 150 minutes of moderate-to-strenuous exercise, or an hour of strenuous physical activity every week; eat at least five servings of fruits and vegetables daily; and quit smoking. But research done in the US and Australia has shown that many cancer survivors do not follow these recommendations.

To investigate the percentage of US cancer survivors who followed the recommendations, and see if doing so had a relationship to health-related quality of life, the researchers surveyed 9,105 survivors of six different types of cancer.

Roughly 15 per cent to 19 per cent were eating at least five servings of fruit and vegetables daily, the researchers found, while 30 per cent to 47 per cent were getting the recommended amount of exercise. From 83 per cent to 92 per cent had quit smoking.

Overall, 5 per cent were meeting all three requirements, while 12.5 per cent were meeting none. Fewer than 10 per cent of survivors of any of the six cancer types were meeting two or more recommendations.

Among breast, prostate, colorectal, bladder, uterine and melanoma survivors all of the cancer types the researchers looked at health-related quality of life rose steadily with the number of lifestyle recommendations met.

In the general US population, the researchers note, an estimated 49 per cent meet physical activity recommendations, 24 per cent meet the 5-A-Day requirement, and 79.5 per cent do not smoke the one area where cancer survivors in this study were doing better.—Reuters