فهرست نشریات علمی دسترسی آزاد ایران

Background and Objective: Evaluating the effects of nutritional prehabilitation on postoperativecomplications in patients with esophageal cancer can not only contribute to optimizing clinical outcomes butalso represents a key step toward evidence-based care and reducing variability in current treatmentpractices. This systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to critically analyze the existing evidenceregarding the impact of preoperative nutrition-based prehabilitation on the severity of postoperativecomplications in patients with esophageal cancer.Materials & Methods: This systematic review and meta-analysis, conducted in accordance withPRISMA guidelines, aimed to assess the effects of preoperative nutrition-based prehabilitation—with orwithout adjunctive physical and psychological interventions—on the severity of postoperative complicationsin patients with esophageal cancer. A comprehensive literature search was conducted in five internationaland two Iranian databases up to September 2025. Only randomized controlled trials (RCTs) were included.Nutritional prehabilitation was defined as the administration of oral supplements or enteral nutrition for aminimum of 7 days, and some studies also incorporated physical training and psychological support. Dataextraction, quality assessment, and statistical analyses were performed independently by two reviewers.Risk ratios (RR), weighted mean differences (WMD), and I² statistics for heterogeneity were used for datasynthesis. Analyses were conducted using RevMan software, and a p-value of <0.05 was consideredstatistically significant.Results: Five RCTs involving a total of 405 patients were included in this systematic review and metaanalysis.The pooled analysis demonstrated a significant reduction in the incidence of severe postoperativecomplications in favor of preoperative nutritional prehabilitation (RR = 0.66, 95% CI: 0.48–0.92). Similarly, acomparable reduction was observed in studies employing multimodal prehabilitation (RR = 0.69, 95% CI:0.49–0.97).Conclusion: The findings of this systematic review and meta-analysis suggest that preoperativenutrition-based prehabilitation—particularly when implemented as part of a multimodal program—caneffectively reduce the severity of postoperative complications in patients undergoing surgery for esophagealcancer. Nutritional interventions should be considered an essential component of preoperative care in thispatient population.