Effects of exercise-based prehabilitation in children undergoing elective surgeries: a systematic review

Background: Prehabilitation is a therapeutic strategy involving preoperative physical exercises, nutritional support, and stress and anxiety reduction. This approach has been gaining popularity and has been seeing effective results in adults in terms of improving pre and postoperative outcomes. The purpose of this review was to summarise the evidence about the effects of exercise-based prehabilitation programs on various outcome measures in children post elective surgeries.­­ Methods: PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, PEDro, CINAHL/EBSCO and EMBASE electronic databases were searched from inception to June 2021. Based on the inclusion criteria, titles and abstracts were independently screened by the authors. After that, a data extraction table of the selected studies which included the participants, type, and details of exercise intervention, outcome measures and results were analysed after which the quality assessment of the studies was done. Results: The search yielded 2219 articles of which three articles fulfilled the inclusion criteria with two studies being randomized controlled trials and one being a quasi-experimental pre-post type of study. One randomized controlled trial was on the effects of exercise-based prehabilitation in reducing pulmonary complications post cardiac surgeries in children and the other two studies were on the effects of prehabilitation on functional capacity & pulmonary function. All the three articles found that exercise-based prehabilitation had a positive effect on children’s post-surgery. Conclusion: Although there is a paucity of evidence-based literature, we conclude based on the existing literature retrieved by our review that exercise-based prehabilitation improves postoperative outcomes and helps in reducing postoperative complications in children undergoing various surgeries.