摘要：Abstract Background: Pretreatment anxiety is one of the most common problems in patients undergoing radiotherapy, especially for the first time. There are limited and contradictory studies on the effect of multimedia as compared with common education methods. This study was intended to evaluate the effect of pretreatment multimedia on patient anxiety in the head and neck cancer radiotherapy setting. Methods: In a randomized clinical trial, 66 patients who resided in eastern Iran were recruited from three cancer treatment centers. The experimental group (n = 33) received a 20-minute multimedia presentation, while its print version of the same content was applied in the control group (n = 33). The study measure was evaluated by the Spielberger State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI), which was answered by the participants at baseline after the visit by a cancer specialist deciding on radiotherapy and 2 weeks later prior to the starting of the treatment. Results: The findings indicated that statistically significant differences were observed in anxiety scores between the groups with multimedia as compared to the control (p = 0.009). Pamphlet-associated education led to a notably larger mean difference in anxiety score between the baseline score and two-week posttreatment score in the controls than multimedia version in the experimental group (p < 0.001). However, adjustment for covariates showed no significant reduction in anxiety between them (p = 0.115). Conclusion: Developing educational materials in written format can successfully reduce radiotherapy-associated anxiety in cancer patients. It may be ascribed to the nature of the media that deals with more detail and facilitates the flow of information.
关键词：anxiety ; multimedia ; education ; radiotherapy ; head and neck cancer
