In a new study, anxiety was significantly lower among cancer patients who viewed art at their bedside.

The daughter of an artist and former fashion designer, Emily Gore, a fourth-year student at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, was looking for a research project that would marry her love of art with medicine.

The results of her randomized clinical trial are reported in the journal Supportive Care in Cancer.

Gore recognized the isolation of hospitalized cancer patients, having to cope with visitor restrictions due to COVID-19 and the immunosuppression that puts them at great risk for infection.

She and her mentor, Susan Dodge-Peters Daiss, senior associate in health humanities and bioethics at the University of Rochester Medical Center, who has a background in chaplaincy and museum education, curated dozens of art images online, including landscapes, and paintings of flowers, angels, and animals. The images were loaded onto an iPad, which was protected by a plastic sleeve to avoid transmission of germs. Their art therapy library included images from galleries from around the world.

The study included 73 patients; the objective was to compare anxiety levels between trial participants and a control group that did not view the art.

Read the full article about how art can help reduce patients' anxiety by Leslie Orr at Futurity.