Tuning into SpongeBob could be one method to reduce the number of anesthesia doses to children with cancer. A study, presented at the ESTRO 36 conference in Vienna, found projecting videos on the inside of a radiotherapy machine during treatment could be a less traumatic, more cost-efficient method of managing pain for these patients.

Of the 215,000 new pediatric cancer cases a year, one in six will require radiotherapy treatment. Researchers believe using video in place of anesthesia could make treatment more relaxed while also improving costs.

"Being treated with radiotherapy means coming in for treatment every weekday for four to six weeks,” said Catia Aguas, a radiation therapist and dosimetrist at the Cliniques Universitaires Saint Luc in Brussels. “The children need to remain motionless during treatment and, on the whole, that means a general anesthesia. That in turn means they have to keep their stomach empty for six hours before the treatment. We wanted to see if installing a projector and letting children watch a video of their choice would allow them to keep still enough that we would not need to give them anesthesia."

The study tested the video method with a tomotherapy treatment unit with 12 children—six were treated before video implementation and six after. Five of the non-video children required anesthesia while only two with the option of video children required it.

“Since we started using videos, children are a lot less anxious,” said Aguas. “Now they know that they're going to watch a movie of their choice, they're more relaxed and once the movie starts it's as though they travel to another world. Now in our clinic, video has almost completely replaced anesthesia, resulting in reduced treatment times and reduction of stress for the young patients and their families.”

"The success of this project is good news for young patients, their families and their medical teams,” said president of ESTRO, Professor Yolande Lievens, head of the department of radiation oncology at Ghent University Hospital, Belgium. “Simply by installing a projector and showing videos, the team have reduced the need for anesthesia and reduced anxiety for these children. For parents this means they no longer have to watch their child going under a general anesthetic and then in to the recovery room after treatment every day for weeks on end. In addition, the use of videos had a positive impact on the workflow in pediatric radiotherapy, which further increased the positive effect observed by the caregivers as well."