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

Comprising the results of a systematic review and meta-analysis synthesizing 19 randomized clinical trials on mind-body exercise for cancer patients. It reports pooled effect sizes for outcomes including anxiety, depression, fatigue, sleep, and health-related quality of life (HRQOL). The analysis indicates statistically significant improvements across these symptom domains compared to usual care.

Use Cases

• Compare the standardized mean difference (SMD) for anxiety, depression, and fatigue to identify the most responsive symptom to mind-body exercise.
• Analyze the subgroup finding that intervention periods of 8 weeks or longer show stronger effects on symptom outcomes.
• Evaluate the differential effects of traditional Chinese exercise versus yoga on specific outcomes like sleep quality and HRQOL.
• Use the reported 95% confidence intervals for each SMD to assess the precision of the effect estimates for meta-analytic modeling.

Strengths

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

Limitations

• The underlying data is a 200.4 KB PDF, requiring manual extraction for computational analysis.
• The sample size (number of rows or patient records) from the original trials is not provided in the description.
• As a meta-analysis of existing studies, it is subject to the limitations and potential biases of the included primary trials.

Provenance

Source

figshare, authored by Xinmei Liu.

Collection Method

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

Time Range

Literature search conducted as of February 2026; publication date of included trials not specified.

Freshness

Last updated in March 2026, with literature search conducted as of February 2026.