Massage therapy safely helps to relieve short-term pain in patients with advanced cancer, a trial suggests.

In Tuesday's issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine, researchers looked at pain and mood scores among 340 people with late stage cancer.

Participants were randomly assigned to have massage therapy by a registered massage therapist, or simple touch by someone who placed both hands on the subjects for three minutes at 10 body sites.

"When patients near the end of life, the goals of medical care change from trying to cure disease to making the patient as comfortable as possible," said study author Dr. Jean Kutner, a professor in the division of general internal medicine at the University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine.

"This study is important because it shows massage is a safe and effective way to provide immediate relief to patients with advanced cancer."

Those in the massage group showed a 1.87-point decline in pain scores compared with 0.97 points for the control group, the researchers found.

"The changes in the massage group were statistically larger than those in the simple-touch group, but all changes were small. Over time, pain, mood, quality of life, and pain medication use were the same in both groups," the journal's summary for patients said.

While massage offered immediate relief to some patients, the beneficial effects did not last for three weeks.

"Massage may offer some immediate relief for patients with advanced cancer, but the absence of sustained effects demonstrates the need for more effective strategies to manage pain at the end of life," the journal's editors concluded.

Limitations of the study included that many of the participants did not attend all six of the assigned treatment sessions, and that the people measuring pain and mood knew who received which treatment, which could skew their interpretation.

It's thought that massage may help improve pain and mood through psychological effects of the therapist's attention, as well as physical or biological effects, such as decreasing inflammation, increasing circulation and release of mood-boosting endorphins.