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How to Train Your Health: Sports as a Resource to Improve Cognitive Abilities in Cancer Patients

From a cognitive-psychological perspective, physical exercise (PE) and sports are an interesting tool for improving people’s cognitive abilities. One field of application for such a tool is decision making (DM) support in chronic patients, cancer patients, and survivors in particular. On the one han...

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Autores principales: Sebri, Valeria, Savioni, Lucrezia, Triberti, Stefano, Mazzocco, Ketti, Pravettoni, Gabriella
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6753215/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31572274
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02096
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author Sebri, Valeria
Savioni, Lucrezia
Triberti, Stefano
Mazzocco, Ketti
Pravettoni, Gabriella
author_facet Sebri, Valeria
Savioni, Lucrezia
Triberti, Stefano
Mazzocco, Ketti
Pravettoni, Gabriella
author_sort Sebri, Valeria
collection PubMed
description From a cognitive-psychological perspective, physical exercise (PE) and sports are an interesting tool for improving people’s cognitive abilities. One field of application for such a tool is decision making (DM) support in chronic patients, cancer patients, and survivors in particular. On the one hand, cancer patients and survivors have to continually take important decisions about their own care (e.g., treatment choice; changes in lifestyle), in collaboration with caregivers and health providers; on the other hand, side effects of treatment may be detrimental to cognitive abilities, such as attention, which make the health DM tasks even more demanding, complex, and emotionally disruptive for patients. Since cancer patients have to engage in healthy activities both for improving their own quality of life and for sustaining the effects of medications, clinical advice to engage in sport and PE is becoming more and more widespread within interventions. However, while sports are usually seen as healthy physical activities, their impact on cognitive abilities is mostly overlooked in the literature. The hypothesis of the present work is that sports could be fully exploited in their potential as focused exercises for cognitive ability training, in the field of cognitive training for chronic patients specifically. Indeed, literature shows that different sports (e.g., individual or team-based) influence and possibly augment cognitive abilities such as focused and divided attention, working memory, and DM under time constraints. Moreover, besides providing training for cognitive abilities, the experience of sports may represent an opportunity to explore, train and sharpen DM abilities directly: we identify five ways in which sport experiences may influence DM processes, and provide indications for future research on the topic.
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spelling pubmed-67532152019-09-30 How to Train Your Health: Sports as a Resource to Improve Cognitive Abilities in Cancer Patients Sebri, Valeria Savioni, Lucrezia Triberti, Stefano Mazzocco, Ketti Pravettoni, Gabriella Front Psychol Psychology From a cognitive-psychological perspective, physical exercise (PE) and sports are an interesting tool for improving people’s cognitive abilities. One field of application for such a tool is decision making (DM) support in chronic patients, cancer patients, and survivors in particular. On the one hand, cancer patients and survivors have to continually take important decisions about their own care (e.g., treatment choice; changes in lifestyle), in collaboration with caregivers and health providers; on the other hand, side effects of treatment may be detrimental to cognitive abilities, such as attention, which make the health DM tasks even more demanding, complex, and emotionally disruptive for patients. Since cancer patients have to engage in healthy activities both for improving their own quality of life and for sustaining the effects of medications, clinical advice to engage in sport and PE is becoming more and more widespread within interventions. However, while sports are usually seen as healthy physical activities, their impact on cognitive abilities is mostly overlooked in the literature. The hypothesis of the present work is that sports could be fully exploited in their potential as focused exercises for cognitive ability training, in the field of cognitive training for chronic patients specifically. Indeed, literature shows that different sports (e.g., individual or team-based) influence and possibly augment cognitive abilities such as focused and divided attention, working memory, and DM under time constraints. Moreover, besides providing training for cognitive abilities, the experience of sports may represent an opportunity to explore, train and sharpen DM abilities directly: we identify five ways in which sport experiences may influence DM processes, and provide indications for future research on the topic. Frontiers Media S.A. 2019-09-13 /pmc/articles/PMC6753215/ /pubmed/31572274 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02096 Text en Copyright © 2019 Sebri, Savioni, Triberti, Mazzocco and Pravettoni. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Sebri, Valeria
Savioni, Lucrezia
Triberti, Stefano
Mazzocco, Ketti
Pravettoni, Gabriella
How to Train Your Health: Sports as a Resource to Improve Cognitive Abilities in Cancer Patients
title How to Train Your Health: Sports as a Resource to Improve Cognitive Abilities in Cancer Patients
title_full How to Train Your Health: Sports as a Resource to Improve Cognitive Abilities in Cancer Patients
title_fullStr How to Train Your Health: Sports as a Resource to Improve Cognitive Abilities in Cancer Patients
title_full_unstemmed How to Train Your Health: Sports as a Resource to Improve Cognitive Abilities in Cancer Patients
title_short How to Train Your Health: Sports as a Resource to Improve Cognitive Abilities in Cancer Patients
title_sort how to train your health: sports as a resource to improve cognitive abilities in cancer patients
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6753215/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31572274
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02096
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