Video game can help in cancer treatment

PLAYING A specially designed video game can help adolescents and young adult cancer patients adhere more closely to their prescribed treatment, according to a report in the journal Pediatrics.

Dr Pamela M Kato of the University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands, the study’s lead author, says: “Targeted video games can help improve the lives of young people with cancer, most importantly improve their adherence to their treatment.”

Adherence is a major problem in this age group, Kato and her colleagues point out in their report.

While dramatic improvements in survival have been seen in paediatric cancer patients, they add, death rates among teens and young adult patients have not followed this trend. “They’re kind of a tough group that gets a little bit lost in the system,” Kato says.

To investigate whether playing a video game might help, the researchers randomly assigned 375 male and female patients aged 13 to 29 years being treated at centres in the US, Canada and Australia to play Re-Mission or Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb, a standard video game not focused on cancer care.

In Re-Mission (http://www2.re-mission.net), developed by HopeLab, a Redwood City, California-based non-profit company, players control a tiny robot called Roxxi who moves around in a 3D environment representing the inside of the body of a young cancer patient.

Players can use Roxxi to blast cancer cells and control side-effects, while winning the game requires taking chemotherapy drugs and antibiotics and keeping up with other care.

Patients in both groups were asked to play their assigned game for at least an hour a week. Electronic pill-monitoring showed a 16 per cent rise in antibiotic adherence in the Re-Mission group, who took 62.3 per cent of their total prescribed antibiotic medications, compared with 52.5 per cent for the Indiana Jones group.

According to Kato, the game worked because it gave the patients a new way of looking at their illness; for example, thinking of chemo as a way to combat cancer rather than as an annoyance that makes their hair fall out.

The game can be downloaded free from the website by patients and medical professionals. – (Reuters)