‘Groundhog Day’ Star Andie MacDowell, 66, Is Coping With Rare Neuromuscular Disorder By Working Out Her ‘Tiny Little Bottom’ & ‘Hips’ Every Day— The Importance of Exercise

She said during the Jan. 23 episode, “It’s a muscle that’s, kind of clamps down on my sciatic nerve and it was shooting down my leg. I thought I was gonna have to have hip replacement. Thank God my hips are fine,” according to Hello Magazine.

As for how she is combatting her pain, Macdowell credits her consistent workout routine for helping her.

“I have to work my tiny little bottom and my hips. I have to work the bottom and work my hip. I just do it every day,” she said on the show, noting that thanks to exercise, “It doesn’t hurt anymore. It’s a miracle, it really is.”

She then admitted, “But most recently… I did the Peloton like a crazy person and it’s not appropriate for my body, and I ended up with bad knees and a bad hip.

“I thought I was literally falling apart like I was gonna have to get new pieces.”

MacDowell, who has been getting help from a personal trainer to direct her with her exercises, continued, “But the good news is my pieces are fine. My knees are good except for like ageing. They’ve aged.

“I’m working out really hard now doing PT. I’m not falling apart. Well, thank God.”

In addition to opening up about her health, MacDowell admitted she moved to a more private town in South Carolina, saying, “I live with a, in a community that has a lot of people my age, so it makes it really easy to socialize.”

MacDowell, a mom of three to Justin, Rainey, and Margaret Qualley, is also enjoying life as a grandmother. We’re glad to see the actress taking care of her health and prioritizing her time in a way that’s best for her.

She also admitted how struggled with her children growing up and moving out, saying, “Once my kids left, I felt this huge void in my life, because they were so important to me.

“Margaret basically told me I needed to get a life. She was right. I do have a life now. I created a life. I figured it out; you know, it took me a while.”

Understanding Piriformis Syndrome

According to Cedars-Sinai, piriformis syndrome is a “condition in which the piriformis muscle, located in the buttock region, spasms and causes buttock pain.

As per the medical center, “The piriformis muscle also can irritate the nearby sciatic nerve and cause pain, numbness and tingling along the back of the leg and into the foot (similar to sciatic pain).”

The piriformis muscle works to assist hip rotation and moving the leg inward and outward. It begins at the lower spine and is connected to the upper part of each thighbone (femur)

It also “tuns diagonally, with the sciatic nerve running vertically directly beneath it (although in some people the nerve can run through the muscle),” Cedars-Sinai explains.

Typical symptoms of this condition often include:

• a minor ache in the buttock
• pain/discomfort moving down the back of the thigh, calf and foot (sciatica)
• pain while walking up stairs or while on an incline
• more pain after sitting for a long period of time
• reduced range of motion in the hip joint

It’s unknown what causes the syndrome, but when it comes to getting a diagnosis, doing so often requires a patient’s medical history, a physical exam, and further diagnostic tests like X-rays, MRI or nerve conduction tests.

Treatment will include:

• exercise and stretching the muscles
• physical therapy to assist range-of-motion
• deep massage
• cold and heat therapy
• anti-inflammatory medications for swelling reduction and reduced pain
• injections like corticosteroid, a local anesthetic, and/or Botox

SurvivorNetTV Presents: Resilient Learning to Overcome

Living a Healthy Lifestyle

One major part MacDowell experiencing less pain associated with the rare disorder she’s living with is healthy exercise habits, something SurvivorNet experts also recommend.

The general recommendations for a healthy lifestyle are the same whether you have cancer or not. Dr. Ken Miller, the Director of Outpatient Oncology at the University of Maryland Greenebaum Cancer Center, has some guidelines for cancer survivors who are concerned about a recurrence:

1. Exercise at least two hours a week, and walking counts.

2. Eat a low-fat diet. The Women’s Intervention Nutrition Study, which looked at early-stage breast cancer patients, found that a low-fat diet was associated with reduced risk for cancer recurrence, particularly in those with estrogen receptor-negative cancers. Other studies have found that foods with a high glycemic index that are digested quickly and cause a spike in blood sugar may lead to tumor growth in lung cancer patients.

3. Eat a colorful diet with lots of fruits and vegetables. The American Cancer Society recommends aiming for two to three cups of vibrant vegetables and fruits each day.

4. Maintain a healthy weight. Studies have shown that being obese can increase your risk for several types of cancer.

The Importance of Exercise

The National Cancer Institute recommends cancer survivors maintain “some level of physical activity.”

The NCI cites a 2018 report by the American College of Sports Medicine International Multidisciplinary Roundtable on Physical Activity and Cancer Prevention and Control, which found “strong evidence that moderate-intensity aerobic training and/or resistance exercise during and after cancer treatment can reduce anxiety, depressive symptoms, and fatigue and improve health-related quality of life and physical function.”

Additional research published in “Cancers” last year noted that “Physical activity has been shown to reduce the side effects of treatment and fatigue in cancer patients.”

WATCH: Exercising and Cancer

“Lack of exercise actually begets fatigue,” Dr. Marleen Meyers, a medical oncologist and Director of the Cancer Survivorship Program at NYU Perlmutter Cancer Center, told SurvivorNet in a previous conversation about how to deal with some of chemo’s most challenging side effects.

“So the best treatment for fatigue is exercise. And what we have to do is get people over the hump, to get initial exercise going.” Dr. Meyers treats patients with breast cancer, but she said her advice applies to many other cancers as well.

RELATED: Exercise and ‘Chemo Brain’: Can Physical Activity Save Breast Cancer Patients from Brain Fog During Chemotherapy?

Have a Rare Disease? Here are Some Resources

All sorts of feelings of anxiety, fear, and loneliness can come with the diagnosis of a rare disease. But it’s important to know you’re not alone. Below are some helpful resources for the many people affected by lesser-known or less-researched diseases.

Academic Centers and Comprehensive Care Centers

For some rare disease warriors, community centers provide great treatment options. But for people with rare conditions, cancer or otherwise, more specialized care may be required. In that case, the most effective place to find a specialist is often at academic centers and comprehensive care centers.

In a previous conversation with SurvivorNet, Dr. Kenneth Miller, director of outpatient oncology at the University of Maryland’s comprehensive cancer center, explained what differentiates a “comprehensive cancer center” from other treatment providers.

Seeking Care at a Comprehensive Cancer Center

“Pretty much automatically, there’s going to be a team approach [to your care],” Dr. Miller said. “Surgical oncology, medical oncology, radiation oncology, and all the support services, and also wonderful pathology and radiology.”

Dr. Miller added that at a comprehensive cancer center, all of these different specialists work together as a team to help you find the best course of treatment for your specific kind of cancer.

“We call it a tumor board, a group to go through all the details of your case so you get a group of very smart people coming up with a plan together that is hopefully optimal and gives you the best chance of doing well.”

Clinicaltrials.gov and the SurvivorNet Clinical Trial Finder

Another place to turn to when you’ve been diagnosed with a rare disease and you’re considering experimental treatment )or trying to find specialists) is clinicaltrials.gov, a database maintained by the U.S. government that compiles privately and publicly funded clinical trials conducted around the world.

Clinical trials themselves are research studies that compare the most effective known treatment for a specific type or stage of a disease with a new approach.

Clinical Trials Can be Life-Saving for Some

Clinicaltrials.gov can help you explore possible treatment options by looking at trials that are actively recruiting. The site also provides the information of some of the most specialized doctors in a specific field since they often end up leading clinical trials that advance our understanding of diseases.

By searching your disease on Clinicaltrials.gov, you will usually come across a list of many studies. The lead researcher will be listed under the heading, “Investigators.” Lead researchers in studies on rare diseases are typically doctors who have specialized in the study of that condition.

And if you’d prefer to search for clinical trials on a more user-friendly site, try SurvivorNet’s new A.I. driven tool built on top of clinicaltrials.gov: the SurvivorNet Clinical Trial Finder. This tool is updated daily and gives users access to more than 100,000+ individual clinical trials to help them find treatment options.

To use the SurvivorNet Clinical Trial Finder, simply answer some basic questions using our custom-designed chat feature and we’ll send clinical trial options within your region right to your email. In simplifying the search, we hope to offer multiple opportunities for clinical trial sponsors and clinical research organizations to engage with patients.

“Clinical trials are critical to the development of new therapies, and as we live through this extraordinary revolution in genomics, immunotherapy and targeted therapy, it’s clear that one of the most pressing needs for patients, clinical trials sponsors, and researchers is simply a better way to find patients,” SurvivorNet CEO Steve Alperin said. “Even one percent more people successfully enrolled in clinical trials can change the world.”

PubMed

Similar to clinicaltrials.gov, PubMed is another place to turn if you’re looking to research your rare disease. This website includes more than 33 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.

If you type in your disease, you’ll see a list of studies and articles about the condition. You can even add a filter to only look at clinical trial information. By looking at the doctors associated with the published clinical trial results and other articles, you may be able to find doctors that specialize in research for your disease.

Newly-Developed Drugs

For those who’ve been recently diagnosed with a rare disease, we also want to highlight reasons for hope since there is something of a revolution going on in the development of drugs for rare diseases.

The sequencing of the human genome has enabled doctors to take new approaches to treating some of these uncommon conditions. One step you may take after being diagnosed with a rare disease is looking into the drug companies developing drugs to treat your condition.

Compassionate Use and Off-Label Use

Drug companies may be able to help patients enroll in clinical trials, and in some rare cases, they may even be able to offer “compassionate use.” Compassionate drug use makes a new drug that has not been fully approved available to a patient facing a serious illness. This only typically happens when a patient has exhausted all other treatment options, but it is an important option to understand.

Similarly, researching drug companies may be a path to “off-label” drug use. Off-label drug use involves taking a drug that has been approved for treating one condition in the hopes that it may treat another condition that it has not yet been approved for.

Contributing: SurvivorNet Staff

Learn more about SurvivorNet's rigorous medical review process.

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