Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Dec 4, 2024
Open Peer Review Period: Dec 5, 2024 - Jan 30, 2025
Date Accepted: Jan 20, 2025
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Digital Health Interventions to Improve Mental Health in Cancer Patients: An Umbrella Review
ABSTRACT
Background:
Mental health plays a key role across the cancer care continuum, from prognosis and active treatment to survivorship and palliative care. Digital health technologies offer an appealing, cost-effective tool to address psychological needs.
Objective:
This umbrella review aimed to summarize and evaluate the available evidence on the efficacy of digital health interventions for improving mental health and psychosocial outcomes for populations with cancer.
Methods:
Literature searches were conducted in Embase, PsycINFO, PubMed, CINAHL, the Cochrane Library, and Web of Science from their inception to February 4, 2024. Systematic reviews (with or without meta-analysis) investigating the efficacy of digital health interventions for psychosocial variables in cancer patients were included. Quality was assessed using the AMSTAR-2 tool.
Results:
In total, 78 systematic reviews, 45 (57ยท7%) of which were meta-analyses, were included in this review. Diverse delivery modalities and types of digital interventions were identified in the reviews, with website and mobile application being the most commonly used. Among the various symptoms, depression was most frequently addressed, followed by QoL, anxiety, fatigue, and distress. The strength and credibility of evidence in the included reviews were significantly heterogeneous. The qualities of the reviews ranged from low to moderate. Globally, digital health interventions were shown to be effective for mental health in patients with cancer.
Conclusions:
Taken together, Digital health interventions appear to be effective at improving mental health in cancer patients. Various gaps were identified, such as little research specifically focusing on elderly cancer patients, a scarcity of reporting high-precision emotion management, and insufficient attention to other certain mood indicators. Further exploration using standardized and rigorous approaches was required to fully capitalize on the benefits of digital health interventions in psycho-oncology care. Clinical Trial: PROSPERO registration number: CRD42024565084
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.