Psychosocial support interventions that promote the health behaviours of patients in medical settings save about 1 in 20 lives, according to a study published May 18 in the open-access journal PLOS Medicine by Timothy B. Smith of Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, United States and colleagues. On average, psychosocial interventions prolonged medical patient life to the same extent as cardiac rehabilitation or treatments for alcoholism or smoking.
The authors searched the literature for relevant randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that were published from 1980 to 2020 and focused their analysis on 106 RCTs including a total of 40,280 patients in inpatient and outpatient health care settings.
Among 87 RCTs reporting data for discrete-time periods, there was a 20% increased likelihood of survival among patients receiving psychosocial support compared to control groups receiving standard medical care. Among those studies, psychosocial interventions explicitly promoting health behaviours improved the likelihood of survival, whereas interventions without that primary focus did not. Across 22 RCTs reporting survival time, psychosocial interventions were associated with a 29% increased probability of survival over time. Studies with patients having relatively greater disease severity tended to yield smaller gains in survival time relative to control groups.
