September 2020 - Linda Denehy

Research Round-up

Dr Kristi Milley spoke to Linda Denehy who is the Head of School and Professor of Physiotherapy at the University of Melbourne, School of Health Sciences as well as a Professor of Allied Health Research at Peter McCallum Cancer Centre. Linda recently published a paper in the Australian Journal of General Practice entitled “'Probably better than any medication we can give you’: General practitioners’ views on exercise and nutrition in cancer" Exercise and healthy eating patterns are effective in improving health-related quality of life for patients with cancer. However, there is limited data on the GPs’ views about providing exercise and nutrition recommendations to their cancer patients. Linda highlights that physiotherapists intersect at every stage of cancer survivorship - each of which presents different exercise and nutrition needs. The paper looked at GPs experiences of providing nutrition exercise advice to their patients and what the barriers and enablers were for them to do this. Reference: Waterland, J. L., Edbrooke, L., Appathurai, A., Lawrance, N., Temple-Smith, M., & Denehy, L. (2020). 'Probably better than any medication we can give you': General practitioners' views on exercise and nutrition in cancer. Australian journal of general practice, 49(8), 513–518. https://doi.org/10.31128/AJGP-12-19-5176