The Role of Exercise Before Cancer Treatment

We aim to describe on the role of exercise in preparation for cancer treatments (prehabilitation) that include surgery and neoadjuvant or nonsurgical approaches. We discuss the evidence for the role of exercise and provide guidelines to exercise prescription and examples of the structure of prehabilitation exercise programs.

We use peer-reviewed articles obtained through PubMed searches with search terms: exercise, oncology, cancer surgery, exercise physiology, respiratory exercises, prehabilitation, and behavior change.

The emergence of prehabilitation in preparing patients for cancer care has followed a rapidly upward trajectory over the past 20 years. Exercise prehabilitation remains the cornerstone of management, particularly in patients attending for major surgery. Multimodal approaches to supporting patients before cancer treatment are now well accepted and include screening and individualized treatments of functional, nutritional, and psychological impairments. Respiratory training before surgery and the addition of behavior change strategies to improve adherence to interventions and promote improved longer-term outcomes are now included in many prehabilitation programs. For exercise to be an effective treatment in improving fitness and strength, supervised aerobic and resistance exercises at moderate intensity are recommended. There remains debate regarding the use of higher-intensity exercise, the appropriate outcome to measure efficacy, and the mechanisms driving the efficacy of exercise.

We provide background evidence and knowledge pertaining to the role and provision of exercise prehabilitation. Understanding screening, risk factors, and potential efficacy assists in knowing who to refer for prehabilitation and what the programs include. This enables more effective com munication with patients attending for cancer treatments.