Prehabilitation of Veterans With Exercise and Nutrition

Approximately half a million operations are performed each year in VA hospitals across the country. Veterans undergoing high-risk surgery have a 1 in 5 chance of suffering complications, a 1 in 10 chance of being readmitted to the hospital within 30 days, and a 1 in 50 chance of dying within 30 days. Long-term survival is significantly reduced for those patients who have perioperative complications, even if they survive to leave the hospital.

Low fitness and poor functional status are among the strongest predictors of postsurgical complications. Prehabilitation takes advantage of the weeks leading up to surgery in order to improve fitness, mobility and nutrition in preparation for the upcoming surgical stress. Indeed, prehabilitation has been shown to improve fitness and reduce complications and quality of life in high-risk surgical patients. The most effective prehabilitation programs combine exercise plus nutritional support (are multimodal), and provide exercise that is supervised and individualized, ensuring the appropriate exercise intensity and increasing it gradually according to improvements in fitness and strength. Most supervised prehabilitation programs are facility-based, but travel time, distance, and transportation limit participation. Unfortunately, home-based prehabilitation programs have shown small effect sizes and low compliance rates, likely because adequate training intensity is required in programs of such short duration, which is often not achieved with unsupervised home-based programs. A prehabilitation program that is delivered using telehealth would be ideal, because it combines accessibility with supervision, encouraging compliance and ensuring adequate training intensity, but such programs do not currently exit within the VA.

The investigators aim to determine the feasibility, acceptability, safety, and effect size estimates for outcomes of interest of a short-term (3-4 week) multimodal prehabilitation intervention that is supervised and individualized, yet is delivered at home using telehealth technology. The exercise program will consist of 3 days of supervised telehealth exercise sessions per week consisting of moderate intensity aerobic training and resistive and functional training. Nutritional support will consist of tailored nutritional advice, whey protein supplementation and multivitamin and vitamin D supplementation during prehabilitation and following hospital discharge for 6 weeks. Compliance with the interventions will be enhanced by daily automated text messages using the VA Annie App. In addition, participants will be contacted weekly in order to identify problems with compliance and to provide counseling. Post-operative exercise sessions will resume as early as 1 week postoperatively and progressed as allowed according to the type of surgery. Text messages and weekly calls will also resume postoperatively until the 6-week follow-up visit to encourage progressive increases in unsupervised physical activity and nutritional support. Objective physical activity data will be collected using physical activity trackers, which patients will wear from the time of enrollment until the 6-week postoperative follow-up visit. Follow-up will continue for a total of 6 months postoperatively.

The main outcomes of interest include feasibility (acceptance rates), acceptability (compliance rates), and safety (number of adverse events). The investigators will also measure changes in fitness, nutritional state, anxiety and depression, and health-related quality of life throughout the study period in order to estimate effect sizes, which will inform a future randomized trial. The proposed work combines several innovations in the delivery of exercise and nutrition and applies them to the perioperative high-risk population for the first time. It constitutes the first step toward the study of a multimodal "tele-prehabilitation" program on postoperative and long-term outcomes following high-risk surgery.