Prehabilitation as an extra approach to usual care for cancer patients

Abstract

Prehabilitation seems to be an important issue in oncology. The main purpose of prehabilitation is to improve a patient’s physical and psychological condition at the beginning of and during cancer treatment. Prehabilitation also reduces the risk of potential complications, average length of stay at hospital, stress and risk of depression, and improves quality of life. Prehabilitation activities should be individualized. Multimodal prehabilitation is more recommended and it can include a spectrum of interventions like: general conditioning exercise, targeted exercise, nutritional interventions, psychological interventions, smoking cessation and education. There is a lack of clinical trials concerning prehabilitation. Therefore new studies are still needed to standardize protocols for different types of cancer and clinical situations, and to estimate the efficacy of prehabilitation programs.