Psychosocial interventions for adolescents and young adult cancer patients: A systematic review and meta-analysis

• Adolescents and young adult cancer patients (AYA) represent a unique population.
• There are different approaches for interventions.
• No intervention is superior regarding effect sizes.
• More age-appropriate interventions are needed.
• Research should focus on psychosocial parameters in this special age-group.

Adolescent and young adult (AYA) cancer patients experience unique psychosocial needs and developmental challenges. A cancer diagnosis can stress this development and disrupt AYAs in their normal life.The aim of this systematic review and meta-analysis was to assess the impact of psychosocial interventions on mental health in AYAs. A literature research was conducted, which resulted in twelve eligible studies.The standardized mean difference between intervention and control conditions was 0.13 (95% CI: −0.16 to 0.42) for quality of life, 0.27 (95% CI: −0.22 to 0.76) for cancer-related knowledge and −0.16 (95% CI: −0.73 to 0.42) on psychological distress indicating, small and non-significant effects for interventions improving mental health.This work strengthens the need for age-appropriated interventions in psycho-oncology. Future research should develop interventions more graduated by age. Randomized intervention studies with larger samples and focusing psychosocial outcomes are needed to establish evidence-based psycho-oncological interventions for AYAs.