Cognitive impairment, pain, distress, and impaired social functioning in pediatric cancer patients and psychological interventions regarding these areas: A systematic review

Cancer is one of the most common childhood and adolescent diseases. Around 200,000 children and adolescents are diagnosed with cancer each year worldwide; also, frequently seen cancer types vary according to the different age groups. Nowadays, the survival rates of pediatric cancer patients are increasing gradually with developing treatment methods. However, problems such as pain, distress, cognitive impairment, and social functioning impairment due to diagnosis, hospitalization or treatment may affect the health and well-being of patients. Concordantly, this article aims to address cognitive impairment, pain, distress, and social functioning impairments due to cancer and treatment as the areas where pediatric cancer patients often have problems with a systematic review method. Therefore, 1265 articles were reached by using "cognitive impairment", "pain", "distress", "social function", "social isolation", "social skills", "childhood/pediatric cancer", and "intervention" as keywords in the articles published between 2003-2021 by PubMed, ScienceDirect, Sage Journals, and Cochrane Library databases. 50 articles out of 1265 articles were included in the review according to the criteria of “articles published in Turkish or English between 2003-2021", "participants are between 0-19 years old and diagnosed with cancer". These articles were reviewed and face-to-face, computer and internet-based contemporary psychological intervention studies for each problem area were explained. Sources about computer-based and internet-based interventions and using them in real life are important for providing psychological support for nonimune patients who cannot leave the hospital room or home. Finally, the discussion and conclusion parts offer suggestions that may shed light on future studies and highlight important results in the literature.