Music Intervention Can Improve Emotion in Cancer Patients during Disease Progression

Abstract

Music has long been regarded to aid health and loss-adaptation, but effect of music intervention on cancer patients is not well-understood. The aims of this study are to summarize and describe the role of music before and after diagnosis. This review examines music intervention studies with randomized designs for patients with cancer published between 1991 and 2015 from three Englishlanguage databases and Chinese-language databases. Ten studies that met specific inclusion criteria were reviewed. Our review indicates that music intervention may have beneficial effects on emotion (anxiety/depression) in patients with cancer. More research is needed to ascertain the most optimal intervention methodology on which cancer populations or which treatment modalities are appropriate for such an intervention.2. Non-peer reviewed literature was excluded. Search strategyThe PICOS strategy, namely Population (P), Intervention (I), Comparison (C), Outcome (O) and Study design (S), was applied for a systematic search of the published articles. In our study, we established P (population) for cancer patients; I (intervention) for music-based intervention; C for comparison of music intervention with another type of intervention or untreated group; O for management of emotion changes and disease progress; S for exception of cross-sectional studies and surveys studies [13,14].