Disney Movies, SpongeBob Make Cancer Radiation Therapy Easier For Kids

Movies could be just as good as anesthesia for many child cancer patients undergoing radiation, and SpongeBob SquarePants, Barbie and Disney’s Cars might be the best choices.

Those three are the most popular videos projected onto the inside of a radiotherapy machine during a study into whether movies could make the kids keep still as well as general anesthesia, according to research that was presented at the European Society for Radiotherapy and Oncology’s ESTRO 36 conference.

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Thousands of kids younger than 15 need radiation treatment every year for certain types of cancer, including brain tumors and the bone cancer Ewing’s sarcoma. They can’t move while in the machine, so they are often given anesthesia — doses that add up after almost daily treatments for several weeks and require them to have empty stomachs. But according to ESTRO, projecting a movie above their faces keeps the kids still and “is less traumatic for children and their families, as well as making each treatment quicker and more cost effective.”

The researchers in Brussels tested the idea on 12 kids between 18 months and 6 years old — with six of the group getting radiation after the movie projector was installed in the machine. The kids without videos needed anesthesia 83 percent of the time and the children who watched videos needed it only 33 percent of the time.

Radiotherapy uses radiation to kill cancer cells, with the high-energy particles, x-rays and gamma rays from the machine damaging those cells’ DNA, the U.S. National Cancer Institute explains. When the genetic material is damaged, the cells either die — and are kicked out of the body — or they stop reproducing and creating new cancer cells, causing tumors to shrink.

“Radiotherapy can be very scary for children,” radiation therapist Catia Aguas, at the Cliniques Universitaires Saint Luc, said in an ESTRO statement. “It’s a huge room full of machines and strange noises, and the worst part is that they’re in the room alone during their treatment. Before their radiotherapy treatment, they have already been through a series of tests and treatments, some of them painful, so when they arrive for radiotherapy they don’t really feel very safe or confident.”

The videos make them less nervous and, without anesthesia being administered, cuts down on the procedure’s time.

“Now in our clinic, video has almost completely replaced anesthesia,” Aguas said.

The next step for the research team is to try out the movies on adult cancer patients who are anxious or claustrophobic in the radiation machine to see if they will have similar results.

See also:

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