Abstract
A cancer diagnoses and treatment can trigger unpleasant emotions, which may affect the Quality of Life (QoL). Games are known to promote wellness. The aim of this study was to evaluate emotions and QoL of adult cancer patients in medical care waiting rooms and to identify changes in patient emotions after playing board games. A total of 150 patients were included. Emotions were assessed using emojis and QoL with WHOOL-BREF. The mean age was 64.8 ± 9.6 years. QoL was measured as ‘good’ just in the social domain (score 72.38 ± 13.24). The most frequently reported emotion before playing was joy (58.0%), followed by neutral (21.3%), sadness (8.7%) and fear (6.7%); 34.0% of the patients accepted to play a board game. Emotions of neutrality and sadness in these patients significantly changed to joy after playing the game (p<0.05). We conclude that participation in games might positively change emotions in waiting rooms.
Highlights
A cancer diagnosis is a stressful experience that may worsen patient emotions, due to treatments and changes in daily routines [1]-[5], besides that psychosocial factors such as fear and anxiety can influence the perception of cancer risk [6]
The lowest mean score was in the physical domain at 59.07±11.25 points. These findings are in agreement with previous studies [33], [40] investigating patients diagnosed with breast cancer that found higher scores in the social domain and lower scores in the physical one
We found no significant associations between the phases or types of treatments and patient Quality of Life (QoL) scores, the often-invasive treatments that patients undergo can result in transient, undesirable side effects such as headaches, fatigue, and weakness [42]
Summary
A cancer diagnosis is a stressful experience that may worsen patient emotions, due to treatments and changes in daily routines [1]-[5], besides that psychosocial factors such as fear and anxiety can influence the perception of cancer risk [6]. Such changes may include hospital visits and time spent in hospital waiting rooms, which can induce emotions that are not positive. A negative emotional state is a natural response that results from the inability to predict, control, and overcome a threatening situation [7]. The negative emotions of fear and sadness may interfere with the course of treatment [10] by affecting immunity or resulting in pain syndromes and somatization [11]
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