Effectiveness and quality of life in lung cancer, pre-, post- and perioperative rehabilitation – A review

Abstract

Functional conditions like lung function and exercise capacity are important limiting factors of chest surgery in lung cancer with co-morbidities (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and other chronic respiratory diseases). Pulmonary rehabilitation has a favourable effect on the cardiovascular system, metabolism, respiratory and peripheral muscles and lung mechanics. Our aim was to assess the role of pre-, post- and peri-operative pulmonary rehabilitation in lung cancer in this review. We sought to size up the importance of pulmonary rehabilitation in patients undergoing surgery with or without (neo)adjuvant treatment, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, chemoradiotherapy, major physiological impairments and complications. Searches were performed in PubMed and ClinicalTrials.gov databases using the terms “exercise”, “rehabilitation”, “small cell lung cancer”, “non-small cell lung cancer”, “exercise capacity”, “chest surgery” and “quality of life” from inception to February 7th, 2022. Pulmonary rehabilitation has been recognized as an effective intervention to reduce lung cancer related symptoms and improve the pulmonary function, lung mechanics, chest kinematics, respiratory- and peripheral muscle function, physical activity and quality of life (QoL) of the patients. In conclusion, this review shows positive, highly encouraging and effective results of pulmonary rehabilitation in terms of the patients' lung function, functional mobility and quality of life. The tools for complex pulmonary rehabilitation have evolved considerably over the past two decades, thus this research has been conducted on a variety of studies about this subject and serves as a synthesis of the systematic and meta-analytic reviews.