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Category: Project

Description: Over the last decade an increasing number of studies have evaluated the health impacts of prehabilitation in intra-abdominal cancer patients. Prehabilitation frequently adopts a multimodality approach, including both physical (i.e. physical activity or structured exercise), nutritional counselling, and psychological interventions (e.g. anxiety reduction, cognitive behavioural therapy). However, in order to evaluate the health benefits in prehabilitation studies, it is important to use patient-appropriate, valid and reliable measurements. The challenge is that prehabilitation interventions are heterogeneous in design (e.g. type and duration of intervention, frequency, intensity, duration, context) and many different measurement tools could be used to evaluate adherence (e.g. self-report tools, objective activity monitors, heart rate, etc.) and efficacy (e.g. CPET, 6MWT, postoperative morbidity, complications)examples of health outcomes here). This makes it difficult to choose the most appropriate outcome during study design and to compare outcomes across different studies. This issue of heterogeneity in outcome measurement and reporting could be reduced with the development and application of an agreed core outcome set (COS). The overall aim of this project is to develop a COS for studies evaluating prehabilitation interventions in intra-abdominal cancer patients.