A Personalized Prehabilitation Intervention In Elective Joint Replacement Surgery

Overview

The mission is to develop novel interventions to improve cognitive function, and thereby reducing delirium in hospitalized patients to improve perioperative outcomes. Delirium affects up to 42% of hospitalized patients and disproportionately increases morbidity and mortality in older adults, especially after surgical procedures. Current approaches prevent only 30-40% of delirium cases. The goal is to use prehabilitation (an individualized exercise regimen performed in the 2-4 weeks prior to admission) to improve peri-operative cognitive status, mobility and recovery. Based on preliminary data, the investigators propose to deeply phenotype patients, meaning to study the patient, the disease and surgery in a very detailed fashion, with elective knee or hip replacement surgery and use a personalized prehabilitation intervention compared to standard pre-operative care. To facilitate data collection over the course of the study, the investigators use wearable devices and mobile phone applications.

The fiscal burden estimated at $164 billion annually in the US alone, with delirium often leading to significant increases in hospital length of stay. The pathophysiology of delirium is multifactorial and incompletely understood. Disruption of circadian rhythms, with subsequent impairment of alertness, and increased inflammation including neuroinflammation, is common in hospital environments, and is associated with poorer outcome, particularly in the elderly. An intriguing new therapeutic concept currently emerging in the area of elective surgery is prehabilitation, a form of exercise training, which when pre-emptively administered in the weeks prior to admission, has the potential to improve postoperative cognitive status, mobility and recovery, thereby minimizing complications such as delirium. Our team has recently developed a novel personalized medicine intervention that uses wearable devices (smartwatches) to create an individualized exercise regimen for older adults that can facilitate prehabilitation and monitor adherence to the prehabilitation regimen while the patient is at home. In one sense, prehabilitation can be conceptualized as bouts of physical exercise performed at home prior to admission, which, when adequately timed using guidance by a wrist-worn biometric mobile device (smartwatch), augment the robustness of circadian rhythms, particularly in the elderly. This intervention has the potential to have a high impact because of its low cost, personalized nature, and ability to monitor adherence to confirm maximization of functional status prior to admission.