Feasibility and Safety of Physical Exercise to Preserve Bone Health in Men With Prostate Cancer Receiving Androgen Deprivation Therapy: A Systematic Review.

Several studies did not say how they monitored adverse events or how many occurred, so the review may overestimate how safe these programmes are. There was no standard way of measuring adherence or adverse events across the studies, which the authors say may have biased their feasibility and safety estimates. Adherence was reported as one overall figure per study, so it is not clear which parts of a programme men actually kept up with. Information on time since diagnosis, cancer stage, how long men had been on androgen deprivation therapy, and other cancer treatments was often missing, which limits how far the findings generalise. The review covers only whether men could take part and whether they were harmed. It does not show whether exercise preserved bone density or prevented falls and fractures. Participants and therapists could not be blinded, and most trials enrolled fewer men than planned, with sample sizes from 25 to 154. Programmes differed widely in type, setting and supervision, and the results were not pooled into a combined estimate.

The article text provided contains no funding or conflict-of-interest statement.

Do not read this review as evidence that exercise protects the bones of men on androgen deprivation therapy or stops them falling. It looked only at whether men could take part and whether they were harmed, none of the included trials recorded falls or fractures, and the review reports no results for bone density.