Effect of Multimodal Prehabilitation on Functional Recovery and Quality of Life After Colorectal Cancer Surgery

The process of enhancing an individual's functional capacity to optimize physiologic reserves before an operation to withstand the stress of surgery has been coined prehabilitation. It has been confirm that trimodal prehabilitation strategy including exercise, diet and psychology guidance could improve postoperative functional recovery after surgery for patients undergoing colorectal resection. Although many clinical studies have confirmed that preoperative exercise for patients undergoing colorectal cancer surgery is safe and useful, but the prehabilitation strategy in previous studies usually takes 4~8 weeks. However, patient suspected of malignant tumor often wouldn't wait for such a long period. Investigators therefore designed this study to investigate if a 1~2 week multimodal prehabilitation strategy benefits the patients undergoing laparoscopic colorectal cancer resection. There will be 100 patients awaiting operation for primary colorectal cancer recruited in this research at The First Affiliated Hospital of Xiamen University.

After informed consent was obtained, the patients will be divided into two groups randomly, the prehibilitation group and control group.

The prehabilitation group will receive an individual trimodal prehabilitation strategy after a complete assessment, including physical exercise, nutritional optimization, and psychological therapy, as well as conventional guidance. The length of prehabilitation was determined by the waiting time till surgery alone. The control group will receive the conventional guidance, including drug treatment recommendations for chronic disease, quit smoking and abstinence. Both of the groups are also provided some useful information about surgery process. The functional capability will be examined for both groups at several time points (baseline, the day before surgery,4 weeks postoperatively) The primary end point is functional walking capacity as measured by the 6 minutes walking distance (6MWD) 4 weeks postoperatively, health-related quality of life scales and cancer-related fatigue. The secondary end points include self-reported physical activity, and prognosis information (postoperative complications, length of hospital stay, ICU stay time, hospitalization expenses, etc.).