Does prehabilitation improve preoperative and postoperative outcomes compared to usual care in patients undergoing orthopedic surgery?
Prehabilitation provides moderate-to-high certainty evidence for improving preoperative and postoperative functional outcomes, strength, and quality of life in patients undergoing major orthopedic surgeries.
In this systematic review and meta-analysis of RCTs, moderate-certainty evidence supported prehabilitation over usual care in improving preoperative function and strength in TKR and HRQOL and muscle strength in THR, high-certainty evidence in reducing back pain, and moderate-certainty evidence in improving HRQOL in lumbar surgery. Postoperatively, moderate-certainty evidence supported prehabilitation for function following TKR at 6 weeks and lumbar surgery at 6 months. Prehabilitation showed promising results for other outcomes, although high risk of bias and heterogeneity affected overall quality of evidence. Additional RCTs with a low risk of bias investigating preoperative and postoperative outcomes for all orthopedic surgical procedures are required.
Punnoose et al. (Thu,) studied this question.