The Impact of Trimodal Prehabilitation Strategy on Patients Undergoing Thoracoscopic Lobectomy

This is a prospective randomized controlled trail, which focus on the impact of family prehabilitaiton strategy on the patients undertaking thoracoscopic lobectomy for lung cancer.

The process of enhancing an individual's functional capacity to optimize physiologic reserves before an operation to withstand the stress of surgery has been coined prehabilitation. It has been confirm that trimodal prehabilitation strategy including exercise, diet and psychology guidance could improve postoperative functional recovery after surgery for patients undergoing colorectal resection. But there has been no research about the impact of trimodal prehabilitation in other operations.

Although many clinical studies have confirmed that preoperative exercise for patients undergoing lung cancer surgery is safe and useful, but so far there are few studies investigated perioperative functional capability in population undergoing thoracoscopic lobectomy. And no study extends preoperative exercise to trimodal prehabilitation adding nutritional and psychological management. In addition, the prehabilitation strategy in previous studies usually takes 4~8 weeks. However, patient suspected of malignant tumor often wouldn't wait for such a long period. We therefore designed this study to investigate if a 2~3 week family trimodal prehabilitation strategy benefits the patients undergoing thoracoscopic lobectomy for lung caner.

There will be 100 patients awaiting elective thoracoscopic lobectomy for primary lung cancer recruited in this research at Peking Union Medical College Hospital. After informed consent was obtained, the patients will be divided into two groups randomly, the prehibilitation group and control group.

The prehabilitation group will receive an individual trimodal prehabilitation strategy after a complete assessment, including physical exercise, nutritional optimization, and psychological therapy, as well as conventional guidance. The length of prehabilitation was determined by the waiting time till surgery alone. The control group will receive the conventional guidance, including preoperative anesthesia assessment, drug treatment recommendations for chronic disease, quit smoking and abstinence. Both of the groups are also provided some useful information about anesthesia and surgery process.

The functional capability will be examined for both groups at several time points (baseline, the day before surgery, 1st, 2nd and 3rd day postoperatively, 4 weeks postoperatively and 8 weeks postoperatively) The primary end point is functional walking capacity as measured by the 6 minutes walking distance (6MWD) 4 weeks postoperatively. The secondary end points include lung function improvement (baseline vs. preoperative) ， self-reported physical activity, health-related quality of life scales and prognosis information (postoperative complications, length of hospital stay, ICU stay time, hospitalization expenses, etc.).