Weight training boosts breast cancer survivors' body image and intimate relationship sa...(fited emotionally from the weight liftin...),Health

Unlike many medical study questionnaires that ask about general quality of life factors, the one used in this study was developed specifically for and by -- breast cancer survivors. Called the Body Image and Relationship Scale, the questionnaire was developed with the help of survivors who had participated in previous clinical trials. The new data are drawn from questionnaires completed by 234 breast cancer survivors at the beginning and end of the trial.

"They told us the basic quality of life questionnaire didn't cover what was important to them," Schmitz says. "They told us what was changing with regular weight lifting and what they cared about, including feeling more proud of their bodies, feeling more comfortable in their own skin, feeling more empowered emotionally because they were more physically powerful, feeling sexier, feeling more like they could wear sleeveless things, feeling more comfortable having people touch their upper bodies, and some of them reported their sex lives improved."

To Schmitz's surprise, no such quality of life questionnaire existed when she initiated the PAL trial, so she and her team designed the Body Image and Relationship Scale.

"There has been an aching need for this assessment tool, not just here, but internationally," Schmitz says. "The survey has already been translated into five other languages Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Hebrew, and Swedish and efforts to use it in clinical practice are underway. These are the issues that women have reported that they cared about for a long time but nobody was ever asking them the question."

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