Description

Tumors of the central nervous system (CNS) represent 25-30% of all cases of pediatric cancer in Sweden. The survival for children with a brain tumor has improved over the last years. The 5-year overall survival rate is now 70%, resulting in a growing number or survivors every year. Malignant brain tumors typically have a poor prognosis, and curative treatment usually requires a combination of neurosurgery, chemotherapy and/or radiotherapy. For the survivors, the cure often comes at the cost of long-term side effects. Finding effective ways to mitigate the long-term side effects after childhood brain tumor is important, since they can severely impact the survivors´ daily life.

There is growing evidence that physical exercise is beneficial to cognition and improves cardiorespiratory fitness and motor function. It appears to be important that interventions start early, within 1-2 years after radiotherapy. For this to be feasible in international multicenter trials, the intervention and outcome assessments will need to be delivered remotely. Whether this is feasible in children treated for medulloblastoma is not known.

The investigators will perform a pilot study to provide pivotal information on whether exercise training can be remotely delivered in the home environment in children treated for medulloblastoma. This will take exercise training from an interesting research concept into a scalable intervention that can be offered regardless of geographic location of the patient. The study will further define the validity and feasibility of in-home outcome assessments of cardiorespiratory, muscular fitness and motor function in children treated for medulloblastoma. If shown feasible, this will work as a proof-of-concept and lead the way for including physical activity intervention in other childhood cancer treatment protocols as well. The results from this study will also enable the researchers to proceed in the planning of the first exercise intervention to be included upfront in an international childhood cancer treatment protocol, the upcoming Pan-European treatment protocol for standard-risk medulloblastoma in children (SIOP-MB6).