NEW YORK (Reuters Health)
— Working with a therapist
to create music videos may help young cancer patients feel better
about themselves and their situation, a new study suggests.
Teenagers and young adults who made the videos
reported feeling more supported by family and friends and coped with
their cancer in more positive ways.
"They're going through an experience that their peers don't really
understand a lot of times," Joan Haase said. She worked on the study
at the Indiana University School of Nursing in Indianapolis.
"There's a lot of issues that they deal with."
Finding a way to express their feelings — and share how they feel
with people around them — might help them work through those issues,
the researchers found.
They studied 113 young people, ages 11 to 24, who were being treated
for cancer with intravenous infusions of stem cells. Most of them
had leukemia or lymphoma.
The preparation for those infusions is grueling. First, patients
have to go through chemotherapy or radiation to wipe out cancerous
cells. During the treatments, their immune systems become very weak
and they can be in the hospital for weeks at a time, with symptoms
like nausea and mouth sores.
All of the patients in the study met with a music therapist six
times over about three weeks while they were in the hospital. Half
were randomly assigned to work with the therapist on making a music
video — writing lyrics, recording a song and selecting art — and the
others listened to audiobooks instead.
The music video program was designed so that young people would be
most involved in the project at the beginning and end, and have less
demanding parts to work on while their symptoms were at their worst.
"It really targeted them writing, having an opportunity to write
about what's important to them," said co-author Sheri Robb, also
from Indiana University.
"A lot of these kids as they're going through treatment, they tend
to not talk about these things," Robb told Reuters Health.
At the end of the study, young people in the music video group could
invite their family and friends to a video premiere.
The researchers found that directly after making the videos, young
people were coping with their cancer in a positive, optimistic way
more often than those who had listened to audiobooks. A few months
after treatment, they felt more support from doctors, friends and
family and reported a better family environment than the other
patients, based on their responses on questionnaires.
Making a music video didn't affect young people's distress related
to their illness, however, or their use of more negative coping
mechanisms, the researchers wrote in Cancer.
Brad Zebrack, who has studied adolescent cancer survivors, said
the findings suggest the video project helped build on young
people's internal resources and improve their self-confidence.
"It's not so much the cancer that stresses them, it's the
fallout," Zebrack, from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor,
told Reuters Health.
"One of the biggest challenges they face is the social isolation.
Having to spend a lot of time at home, not being able to be with
their friends for a lot of time. The disruption of cancer comes at a
time in life when that type of social interaction is so important."
But, he added, "We know that most people bounce back. Most people
are resilient."
Zebrack, who was not involved in the new research, said the
benefits of working with a music therapist are likely to extend to
young people with any kind of cancer, not just those receiving stem
cell transplants.
Music therapists are increasingly considered part of standard care
at children's hospitals, the researchers noted.
But most people in their late teens and 20s with cancer are treated
in private oncology groups, which typically don't have a social
worker or therapist on staff, according to Zebrack.
"The big challenge is how we can move this type of intervention from
the hospitals and the academic treatment centers out into the
community and out into the places where more young adults are
treated," he said.
Teenagers and young adults who made the videos
reported feeling more supported by family and friends and coped with
their cancer in more positive ways.
