Mr Sam Bushaway1, Mr Morgan Atkinson1, Prof Carol Maher, Dr Ben Singh2, Mrs Karlee Naumann1, Mrs Swapna Deepak1, Mrs Amie Hartland1, Mr Peter Konstantopoulos1, Mrs Alison Virieux1, Mrs Michelle Wall1, Dr Sarah Wilsch1
1Central Adelaide Local Health Network, Adelaide, Australia, 2Alliance for Research in Exercise Nutrition and Activity (ARENA), University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia
Biography:
Sam Bushaway works as the senior physiotherapist in cancer services at the Royal Adelaide Hospital. He was part of a multidisciplinary allied team, supported the Professor Carol Maher and Dr Ben Singh from UniSA, who investigated the feasibility of a multidisciplinary prehabilitation intervention for AML/MDS patients.
Background: A multidisciplinary prehabilitation approach may help to counter the negative physical, psychological and social impacts experienced during an allogenic hematopoietic stem cell transplant (allo-HSCT) among Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) and Myelodysplastic Syndrome (MDS) patients. Objective: This study investigated the feasibility, safety and preliminary efficacy of multidisciplinary prehabilitation in adults offered allo-HSCT. Methods: This single-group pilot study delivered an 8-week multidisciplinary prehabilitation intervention for participants undergoing allo-HSCT, focusing on feasibility and safety. Participants, aged 18 years or older, diagnosed with AML or MDS, and offered allo-HSCT, were recruited between June 2023 and July 2024. The intervention included exercise physiology, physiotherapy, dietetics, social work, occupational therapy and psychological interventions. The primary outcome was feasibility, which was assessed by evaluating intervention uptake, retention, adherence, acceptability and safety. Results: The recruitment achieved a satisfactory (70.4%) uptake rate, with 19 participants enrolled. One participant withdrew from the study. Of the 18 who completed the intervention, 11 completed the entire 8 weeks, while 7 received shorter interventions (3-7 weeks) as they proceeded to transplant sooner than anticipated. The intervention demonstrated high adherence (79.3%), was deemed acceptable and valuable by participants and was safe. Evaluation of preliminary efficacy demonstrated improvements across several functional and patient-reported outcomes. Conclusion: Based on this study’s favourable safety, feasibility and preliminary efficacy results, future, larger-scale research is warranted to evaluate the efficacy of multidisciplinary prehabilitation more rigorously in this setting. The preliminary efficacy results provided by this study may be helpful to inform sample size calculations.