Music improves mood, reduces distress during chemotherapy infusion
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Key takeaways:
- Music may be a cost-effective tool to improve patients’ psychological well-being during infusion.
- Further research is needed to better understand why certain patients with cancer may benefit.
Listening to music during chemotherapy infusion appeared to improve mood and reduce distress among a cohort of patients with cancer, according to study results published in JCO Oncology Practice.
Factors associated with greater benefit from music included married or widowed status and receiving disability income, researchers noted.
Rationale and methods
Music has been shown to have positive effects on physical and psychological outcomes during many aspects of the cancer experience, Felicity W.K. Harper, PhD, associate director for population sciences in the population disparities research program at Karmanos Cancer Institute at Wayne State University School of Medicine, told Healio.
“Given that there are few nonpharmacological treatments to help manage patients’ distress during chemotherapy infusion, we hoped to determine whether a music intervention could be an easy and safe way to mitigate distress for patients during treatment,” she said.
The open-label, multisite, day-based permuted block randomization study included 708 adults (median age, 60.39 years; 65% women; 68% white) with cancer receiving outpatient chemotherapy infusion treatment.
Researchers randomly assigned patients to either a music intervention (n = 376), which consisted of listening to self-selected music on an iPod shuffle for up to 60 minutes, or no music intervention (n = 332). Patients self-reported changes in pain, positive and negative mood, and distress, which served as the primary outcome. Secondary outcomes included correlates of change in outcomes from pre- to post-intervention.
Findings
Results showed patients assigned to the music intervention experienced a significant improvement in positive mood, reduced negative mood and distress (all two-sample t-tests, P < .05).
Least absolute shrinkage and selection operator, or LASSO, penalized linear regression models showed benefit for certain patients based on their relationship (P = .032) and employment (P = .029) status, where those with married or widowed status and those on disability experienced better outcomes.
Conversely, researchers observed no significant changes in pain between the two groups or changes in outcomes based on having a companion participate in the intervention (P > .05 for all).
Limitations of the study included the small effect sizes for change in positive and negative mood and distress, and the intervention being mostly self-directed, which potentially could have benefited by having a music therapist to introduce factors such as therapeutic rapport, more time spent with the patient and directed instructions about the benefits of music, the researchers noted.
Implications
Listening to music is an easy to implement, cost-effective and low-risk way to manage patients’ psychological well-being in the often-stressful context of a cancer infusion clinic, Harper told Healio.
“Staff can suggest that patients listen to music as a way to manage their worry and distress during treatment,” she said. “Our next step is to better understand why some patients may benefit from music medicine more than other patients. We also hope to understand whether having patients’ companions listen to music during infusion has benefit for companions’ psychological well-being as well as that of patients during infusion.”
For more information:
Felicity W.K. Harper, PhD, can be reached at harperf@karmanos.org.
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