Meta-Analysis of Mind-Body Exercise Effects on Cancer Symptoms from 19 RCTs

Aggregating the results of a systematic review and meta-analysis evaluating the impact of mind-body exercise on mental health, physical symptoms, and health-related quality of life in cancer patients. It synthesizes outcome indicators from 19 randomized clinical trials, reporting pooled effect sizes for anxiety, depression, fatigue, sleep, and HRQOL.

Use Cases

• Compare the standardized mean difference (SMD) for anxiety, depression, and fatigue across intervention types like traditional Chinese exercise and yoga.
• Analyze the effect of intervention period (e.g., >= 8 weeks) on pooled effect sizes for outcomes like sleep quality and HRQOL.
• Examine the 95% confidence intervals for SMD values to assess the precision of estimates for symptom improvements.
• Investigate subgroup analysis results on how intervention type influences specific outcomes such as fatigue reduction or HRQOL improvement.

Strengths

• Synthesizes data from 19 randomized clinical trials, providing a consolidated evidence base.
• Reports specific pooled effect sizes (SMD) with 95% confidence intervals for five key outcome indicators.
• Includes subgroup analysis based on intervention period and type (e.g., traditional Chinese exercise, yoga).
• Published under a CC BY 4.0 license, allowing for flexible reuse.

Limitations

• The underlying sample data and row/column structure from the original trials are not provided, limiting direct statistical re-analysis.
• As a meta-analysis of existing studies, it may inherit limitations like publication bias or heterogeneity from the included trials.
• The dataset is a 1.5 MB PDF, which is a small, static document not in a machine-readable tabular format.

Provenance

Source

figshare, authored by Xinmei Liu.

Collection Method

Systematic review and meta-analysis of data retrieved from eight databases as of February 2026.

Time Range

Covers studies included up to February 2026.

Freshness

Last updated on 2026-03-20.