The issue
Cancer may result in extensive emotional, physical and social suffering. Current cancer care increasingly incorporates psychosocial interventions to improve quality of life. Creative arts therapies such as dance/movement, music, art and drama therapy have been used to aid care and recovery. Following medical therapies, which can be invasive, people with cancer use dance/movement therapy to learn to accept and reconnect with their bodies, build new self-confidence, enhance self-expression, address feelings of isolation, depression, anger, fear and distrust and strengthen personal resources. It has also been used to improve range of arm motion and to reduce arm circumference after mastectomy or lumpectomy. For this review, studies were considered only if dance/movement therapy was provided by a formally trained dance/movement therapist or by trainees in a formal program.
The aim of the review
This review is an update of a previous Cochrane review from 2011, which included two studies which did not find support for an effect of dance/movement therapy on body image, the only common outcome between the two studies. The aim was to examine the impact of dance/movement therapy on psychological and physical outcomes in people with cancer.
For this review update, we searched for additional trials on the effect of dance/movement therapy on psychological and physical outcomes in people with cancer. We searched for published and ongoing studies up toJuly 2014. We considered all studies in which dance/movement therapy was compared with any form of standard treatment.
What are the main findings?
We identified one new study for this update. The three studies included a a total of 207 participants, which were women with breast cancer. The studies were small in size. We found no evidence of an effect for depression, stress, anxiety, fatigue, and body image. The findings of individual studies suggest that dance/movement therapy may have a beneficial effect on the quality of life, somatization (i.e. distress arising from perceptions of bodily dysfunction) and vigor of women with breast cancer. No adverse effects of dance/movement therapy interventions were reported.
Quality of the evidence
The evidence is based on only three small studies and the quality of the evidence is not strong.
What are the conclusions?
No conclusions could be drawn regarding the effect of dance/movement therapy on psychological and physical outcomes in cancer patients because of an insufficient number of studies. More research is needed. We did not identify any conflicts of interests in the included studies.
We did not find support for an effect of dance/movement therapy on depression, stress, anxiety, fatigue and body image . The findings of individual studies suggest that dance/movement therapy may have a beneficial effect on QoL, somatization, and vigor. However, the limited number of studies prevents us from drawing conclusions concerning the effects of dance/movement therapy on psychological and physical outcomes in cancer patients.
Current cancer care increasingly incorporates psychosocial interventions. Cancer patients use dance/movement therapy to learn to accept and reconnect with their bodies, build new self-confidence, enhance self-expression, address feelings of isolation, depression, anger and fear and to strengthen personal resources.
To update the previously published review that examined the effects of dance/movement therapy and standard care versus standard care alone or standard care and other interventions on psychological and physical outcomes in patients with cancer.
We searched the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) (The Cochrane Library 2014, Issue 6), MEDLINE (OvidSP, 1950 to June week 4, 2014), EMBASE (OvidSP, 1980 to 2014 week 26), CINAHL (EBSCOhost, 1982 to July 15 2014), PsycINFO (EBSCOhost, 1806 to July 15 2014), LILACS (Virual Health Library, 1982 to July 15 2014), Science Citation Index (ISI, 1974 to July 15 2014), CancerLit (1983 to 2003), International Bibliography of Theatre and Dance (1989 to July 15 2014), the National Research Register (2000 to September 2007), Proquest Digital Dissertations, ClinicalTrials.gov, and Current Controlled Trials (all to July 15 2014). We handsearched dance/movement therapy and related topics journals, reviewed reference lists and contacted experts. There was no language restriction.
We included all randomized and quasi-randomized controlled trials of dance/movement therapy interventions for improving psychological and physical outcomes in patients with cancer. We considered studies only if dance/movement therapy was provided by a formally trained dance/movement therapist or by trainees in a formal dance/movement therapy program.
Two review authors independently extracted the data and assessed the methodological quality, seeking additional information from the trial researchers when necessary. Results were presented using standardized mean differences.
We identified one new trial for inclusion in this update. In total, the evidence for this review rests on three studies with a total of 207 participants.
We found no evidence for an effect of dance/movement therapy on depression (standardized mean difference (SMD) = 0.02, 95% confidence interval (CI) -0.28 to 0.32, P = 0.89, I2 = 0%) (two studies, N = 170), stress (SMD = -0.18, 95% CI -0.48 to 0.12, P = 0.24, I2 = 0%) (two studies, N = 170), anxiety (SMD = 0.21, 95% CI -0.09 to 0.51 P = 0.18, I2 = 0%) (two studies, N = 170), fatigue (SMD = -0.36, 95% -1.26 to 0.55, P = 0.44, I² = 80%) (two studies, N = 170) and body image (SMD = -0.13, 95% CI -0.61 to 0.34, P = 0.58, I2 = 0%) (two studies, N = 68) in women with breast cancer. The data of one study with moderate risk of bias suggested that dance/movement therapy had a large beneficial effect on 37 participants' quality of life (QoL) (SMD = 0.89, 95% CI 0.21 to 1.57). One study with a high risk of bias reported greater improvements in vigor and greater reduction in somatization in the dance/movement therapy group compared to a standard care control group (N = 31). The individual studies did not find support for an effect of dance/movement therapy on mood, mental health, and pain. It is unclear whether this was due to ineffectiveness of the treatment, inappropriate outcome measures or limited power of the trials. Finally, the results of one study did not find evidence for an effect of dance/movement therapy on shoulder range of motion (ROM) or arm circumference in 37 women who underwent a lumpectomy or breast surgery. However, this was likely due to large within-group variability for shoulder ROM and a limited number of participants with lymphedema.
Two studies presented moderate risk of bias and one study high risk of bias. Therefore, overall, the quality of the evidence is very low.