Diseases of the colon and rectum
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Prehabilitation reflects a proactive process of preoperative optimization undertaken between cancer diagnosis and definitive surgical treatment, with the intent of improving physiological capacity to withstand the major insult of surgery. Prehabilitation before GI cancer surgery is currently not widely adopted, and most research has focused on unimodal interventions such as exercise therapy, nutritional supplementation, and hematinic optimization. A review of the existing literature was undertaken to investigate the impact of multimodal prehabilitation programs as a "bundle of care." ⋯ Although small studies are supportive of multimodal interventions, there are insufficient data to make a conclusion about the integration of prehabilitation in GI cancer surgery as a bundle of care. Larger, prospective trials, utilizing uniform objective risk stratification and structured interventions, with predefined clinical and health economic end points, are required before definitive value can be assigned to prehabilitation programs.