Could ‘prehabilitation’ help prepare children with cancer for a stem cell transplant?

Haematopoietic stem cell transplants (HSCT), also called bone marrow transplants, are intensive treatments that can be used for some childhood blood cancers. Evidence has shown that exercise during and after HSCT is safe for adults and can improve the side effects of the treatment. This is called ‘prehabilitation’, which means any changes in lifestyle (like exercise and diet) that aim to prepare patients for treatment. Currently, we don’t know what impact prehabilitation could have for children and young people undergoing an HSCT.

Debbi Rowley, a physiotherapist at Sheffield Children’s Foundation Trust, is leading a project to evaluate the benefit of prehabilitation for young patients. She will look at all of the current evidence on prehabilitation programmes for children and young people with cancer receiving HSCTs, which could involve exercise with or without additional changes to diet.

Debbi will then discuss this information with the hospital staff who care for children with cancer, and with patients and their families. She hopes to understand when and where prehabilitation should be used in a patient’s cancer journey.  Her findings will be used to develop guidelines and a prehabilitation programme, which could be taken forward into a bigger research project across multiple principal treatment centres.