Prehabilitation in Liver Surgery

Each year in the UK around 1500 patients undergo surgery for bowel cancer that has spread to the liver. This is major surgery that offers a chance of cure, but can be associated with complications. Fitter patients are less likely to have serious complications. We are interested in finding out whether a short exercise program can improve patient fitness before surgery and whether this can reduce surgical complications.
We plan to measure the fitness of patients who are going to have liver surgery. We will then give them an exercise programme for 4 weeks, after which we will assess their fitness again.
We are also interested in whether fitter people have better Liver function. To assess this we will take a small sample of liver tissue during the operation for laboratory analysis of its function.
Hypothesis
1. A short period of exercise can significantly improve fitness prior to liver surgery
2. Greater Fitness is associated with better liver function.