A team of Detroit-based researchers, led by a behavioral scientist from the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute, has launched a unique study to learn how parents can best help their children deal with painful procedures required for cancer treatment.
The recently unveiled research program – “Parental Roles in Pediatric Cancer Pain and Survivorship” – is funded by a $1 million grant from the National Cancer Institute and is designed to answer a crucial question in the treatment of pediatric cancer: How should parents go about the highly challenging task of helping their kids weather difficult and sometimes frightening cancer therapies?
The breakthrough program, the first of its kind in U.S. pediatric cancer research, is utilizing state-of-the-art video technology to observe and record 150 different pediatric cancer procedures, during which parents do their best to help their children undergo rigorous cancer-fighting procedures such as lumbar punctures and bone marrow aspirations. More than two-dozen families have already been recorded. To help ascertain the effectiveness of these parental efforts, researchers are collecting physiological data by measuring substances in saliva, blood and spinal fluid enabling them to gauge the stress that the children and their parents are feeling. The pediatric cancer patients involved in the study are being treated at Children’s Hospital of Michigan.
“Medical practitioners have known for a long time that families differ widely in terms of their resilience and their ability to cope with the stress of pediatric cancer,” said Terrance L. Albrecht, Ph.D., the lead investigator in the study. “But until quite recently, researchers haven’t had the technology required to directly observe parent-child interactions, and learn how families deal with the situation of cancer as it is actually occurring.”