Effectiveness of psychosocial interventions in pediatric oncology and hematology: a systematic review and three-level meta-analysis

Background: This preregistered systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to comprehensively assess the effectiveness of psychosocial interventions on health outcomes in pediatric patients undergoing treatment for cancer. Methods: A systematic literature search was conducted across multiple databases. The review included studies reporting samples with children and/or adolescents undergoing cancer treatment, focusing on randomised controlled trials of psychosocial interventions with a quantified health outcome. A three-level meta-analytic approach was utilised. Results: A total of 74 studies (total N = 4526), providing 204 effect sizes, was eligible. The summary effect estimate was of medium size and nominally significant (Hedges g = 0.46, 95% CI [0.33–0.59]). Subgroup analyses revealed significant differences for health outcome and publication year only. Physiological outcomes showed a smaller effect (g = 0.14, 95% CI [−0.16–0.43]), and more recent publications showed larger effect sizes. Discussion: This research synthesis provides evidence supporting the impact of psychosocial interventions on health outcomes in pediatric oncology and hematology patients. Despite variations in study quality and heterogeneity of the primary literature corpus, psychosocial care emerged as beneficial across a diverse range of contexts.