Questioning Medicine

https://www.bmj.com/content/388/bmj-2024-081164systematic review and meta-analysis on prehabilitation before surgery, published in the BMJ in February 2025.Prehabilitation aims to prepare patients for surgery through interventions like exercise, nutrition, and psychological support. This study looked at which prehabilitation components are most effective for improving key outcomes after surgery.The researchers analyzed 186 randomized trials with over 15,000 participants. They used advanced statistical methods to compare different prehabilitation approaches.The key findings were: Exercise-only prehabilitation reduced complications by about 50% compared to usual care. Nutritional prehabilitation alone reduced complications by about 38%. Combining exercise, nutrition, and psychosocial support reduced complications by about 36%. For hospital length of stay, exercise plus psychosocial support was most effective, reducing stays by about 2.5 days on average. Multicomponent prehabilitation including exercise, nutriti