Exercise prehabilitation for brain health and sensory-cognitive function : Mechanistic insights into brain-body interactions

Nuttall, Helen E and Subar, Daren and Gaffney, Christopher (2025) Exercise prehabilitation for brain health and sensory-cognitive function : Mechanistic insights into brain-body interactions. Experimental Physiology. ISSN 0958-0670 (In Press)

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Abstract

This mini review article presents a novel hypothesis for extending exercise prehabilitation into the domains of brain health and cognition. Whilst prehabilitation has been gaining popularity in cancer treatment, conferring significant positive benefits to numerous physiological indicators, including post-operative infection and hospital length of stay, the benefits to patients' brain health and cognition are underexplored. There lies a timely and exciting opportunity in expanding prehabilitation to target neural and sensory dysfunction in cancer patients. We review data from healthy adults on the benefits of exercise to brain structure and function, and cognitive and sensory domains. Finally, we review how exercise could improve brain health, as well as sensory systems of the body, which are often negatively affected by cancer and associated treatment. We also outline further physiological contexts outside of cancer in which prehabilitation could also benefit brain health. Through this synthesis, we seek to inspire novel research into prehabilitation and brain health to further improve patient health and wellbeing.