# Prehabilitation of Veterans with Exercise and Nutrition (PREVENT) > **NIH VA I21** · DURHAM VA MEDICAL CENTER · 2024 · — ## Abstract Approximately half a million operations are performed each year in VA hospitals across the country.4 Veterans undergoing high-risk surgery have a 1 in 5 chance of suffering complications, a 1 in 10 chance of being readmitted to the hospital within 30 days, and a 1 in 50 chance of dying within 30 days.4 Long-term survival is significantly reduced for those patients who have perioperative complications, even if they survive to leave the hospital.5 Low fitness and poor functional status are among the strongest predictors of postsurgical complications.1,2 Prehabilitation takes advantage of the weeks leading up to surgery in order to improve fitness, mobility and nutrition in preparation for the upcoming surgical stress.13 Indeed, prehabilitation has been shown to improve fitness and reduce complications and quality of life in high-risk surgical patients.7,9,12 The most effective prehabilitation programs combine exercise plus nutritional support (are multimodal), and provide exercise that is supervised and individualized, ensuring the appropriate exercise intensity and increasing it gradually according to improvements in fitness and strength. Most supervised prehabilitation programs are facility-based, but travel time, distance, and transportation limit participation.10 Unfortunately, home-based prehabilitation programs have shown small effect sizes and low compliance rates, likely because adequate training intensity is required in programs of such short duration, which is often not achieved with unsupervised home-based programs.14-16 [[A prehabilitation program that is delivered using telehealth would be ideal, because it combines accessibility with supervision, encouraging compliance and ensuring adequate training intensity, but such programs do not currently exit within the VA]]. [[We aim to determine the feasibility, acceptability, safety, and effect size estimates for outcomes of interest of a short-term (3-4 week) multimodal prehabilitation intervention that is supervised and individualized, yet is delivered at home using telehealth technology.]] The exercise program will consist of 3 days of supervised telehealth exercise sessions per week consisting of moderate intensity aerobic training and resistive and functional training. Nutritional support will consist of tailored nutritional advice, whey protein supplementation and multivitamin and vitamin D supplementation during prehabilitation and following hospital discharge for [[6 weeks]]. Compliance with the interventions will be enhanced by daily automated text messages using the VA Annie App. In addition, participants will be contacted weekly in order to identify problems with compliance and to provide counseling. [[Post-operative exercise sessions will resume as early as 1 week postoperatively and progressed as allowed according to the type of surgery. Text messages and weekly calls will also resume postoperatively until the 6-week follow-up visit to encourage progressive increases in unsuperv... ## Key facts - **NIH application ID:** 10933463 - **Project number:** 5I21RX003468-04 - **Recipient organization:** DURHAM VA MEDICAL CENTER - **Principal Investigator:** Atilio Barbeito - **Activity code:** I21 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.) - **Funding institute:** VA - **Fiscal year:** 2024 - **Award amount:** — - **Award type:** 5 - **Project period:** 2020-10-01 → 2024-03-31 ## Primary source NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10933463 ## Citation > US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10933463, Prehabilitation of Veterans with Exercise and Nutrition (PREVENT) (5I21RX003468-04). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10933463. Licensed CC0. --- *[NIH grants dataset](/datasets/nih-grants) · CC0 1.0*