Investigation of the Effect of Prehabilitation Practice on Patient Outcomes in Frail Patients Planned for Elective Coronary Artery Bypass Graft

The basic concept of prehabilitation is to increase the functional capacity of the individual to withstand an expected injury. It embodies the idea of being proactive against the common reactive approach of rehabilitation. While the initial prehabilitation model was limited to physical training, it has now evolved into a multimodal entity that includes nutritional optimisation, psychosocial preparation and smoking cessation in addition to exercise programmes. In the last decade, there has been an increasing effort to coincide prehabilitation with surgery, as surgery is rightly perceived as a stressor for human structural and physiological functions.

Frailty is an increasingly recognised risk factor for surgery. The degree of frailty and how this may affect postoperative recovery profiles is unclear. Preoperative frailty may predispose patients to worse outcomes in cardiac surgery; however, there is limited data on how preoperative frailty affects patient outcomes through prehabilitation practices.