Prehabilitation for spine surgery: A scoping review

We aimed to identify and describe the current interventions used in preoperative programs ("prehabilitation") for spine surgery. Knowledge gaps in approaches, feasibility, timing, patient experience, clinical outcomes, and health care costs were explored while describing their potential benefits on physical and psychological outcomes. An electronic search was conducted from January 2004 to February 2022 in Ovid Medline, Embase, EBSCO CINAHL, the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, and PEDro to identify studies in English evaluating adults enrolled in prehabilitation before undergoing elective spine surgeries. Studies were uploaded into DistillerSR for systematic screening after removing duplicates. Four reviewers screened nested references for inclusion based on titles and abstracts, followed by their full-text review. Two reviewers subsequently extracted data and summarized the results. The results were reported using Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews guidelines. Studies were rated for quality using National Health and Medical Research Council criteria. Out of 18,879 potential studies, a total of 23 studies (0.12%) met the eligibility criteria and were included in this scoping review. The prehabilitation programs included general education (n = 6, 26%), exercise (n = 6, 26%), cognitive behavioral therapy (n = 3, 13%), pain neuroscience education (n = 3, 13%), health behavior counseling (n = 3, 13%), and mindfulness (n = 2, 9%). Additional studies are needed to identify optimal patient characteristics, intervention dosage, and whether multimodal approaches using a combination of physical and psychological strategies lead to more favorable outcomes. Although studies on prehabilitation for spine surgery are limited, they seem to demonstrate that prehabilitation programs are feasible, reduce medical expenditures, and improve patients' postoperative pain, disability, self-efficacy, psychological behaviors, and satisfaction with surgical outcomes. The available literature suggests there is an opportunity to improve patient experience, clinical outcomes and reduce medical costs with the use of prehabilitation in spine surgery.