Multicomponent Prehabilitation Beneficial for Surgical Patients

WEDNESDAY, Jan. 29, 2025 (HealthDay News) — Exercise prehabilitation, nutritional prehabilitation, and multicomponent interventions involving exercise may be beneficial for adults undergoing surgery, according to a review published online Jan. 22 in The BMJ.

Daniel I. McIsaac, M.D., M.P.H., from the University of Ottawa in Ontario, Canada, and colleagues conducted a systematic review to estimate the relative efficacy of individual and combinations of prehabilitation components (exercise, nutrition, cognitive, and psychosocial) on critical outcomes of postoperative complications, length of stay, health-related quality of life, and physical recovery for adults undergoing surgery. Data were included for 186 unique randomized controlled trials with 15,684 participants.

The researchers found that isolated exercise, isolated nutritional, and combined exercise, nutrition, plus psychosocial prehabilitation were most likely to reduce complications compared with usual care when comparing treatments using a random-effects network meta-analysis (odds ratios, 0.50, 0.62, and 0.64, respectively). Combined exercise and psychosocial, combined exercise and nutrition, isolated exercise, and isolated nutritional prehabilitation were most likely to reduce the length of stay (−2.44, −1.22, −0.93, and −0.99 days, respectively). The prehabilitation most likely to improve health-related quality of life and physical recovery was combined exercise, nutrition, plus psychosocial prehabilitation. Exercise and nutrition were the individual components most likely to improve all critical outcomes.

“The goal of our research program is to develop a simple and effective approach to prehabilitation that can benefit the largest number of patients in meaningfully improving their surgical recovery and help patients get home faster after surgery,” McIsaac said in a statement.

One author disclosed ties to the nutrition industry.

Abstract/Full Text