Young cancer patients might feel better about themselves and their situation when they create music videos with a therapist, a new study suggests.
Feeling more supported by family and friends and coping with their cancer in more positive ways was one of the advantages that teenagers and young adults felt while making those videos, Reuters reported.
"They're going through an experience that their peers don't really understand a lot of times," Joan Haase, who worked on the study at the Indiana University School of Nursing in Indianapolis, said. "There's a lot of issues that they deal with."
Researchers found that creating music videos might make it easier for the cancer patients to work through their issues as they get a chance to express their feelings and share what they feel with people around them.
Patients, being treated for cancer with intravenous infusions of stem cells, consisted of 113 young people aged 11 to 24. Most of them had leukemia or lymphoma, according to Reuters.
"The preparation for those infusions is grueling. First, patients have to go through chemotherapy or radiation to wipe out cancerous cells," according to Reuters. "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."
While they were in the hospital, all of the patients in the study met with a music therapist six times over about three weeks.
Writing lyrics, recording a song and selecting art was randomly assigned to half of the patients as part of making a music video with a music therapist. The rest listened to audiobooks instead, Reuters reported.
Designed for young people, the music video program aimed to involve them 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.
Compared to those who had listened to audiobooks, the patients that had created music videos were coping with their cancer in a more positive, optimistic way, the researchers said.
Based on their responses on questionnaires, a few months after treatment, they felt more support from doctors, friends and family and reported a better family environment than the other patients, Reuters reported.
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.
Young people's internal resources and their self-confidence was improved through the video project, Brad Zebrack, who has studied adolescent cancer survivors, said.
"It's not so much the cancer that stresses them, it's the fallout," Zebrack, from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, said. "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, Reuters reported.
The standard care at children's hospitals is increasingly using music therapists, 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.
