Alexandra Tirabassi was diagnosed with leukemia five years ago.

She was just 13 years old but she can still remember the intravenous chemotherapy treatments that had her puking every five minutes for a month straight.

She also recalls the steroid pills she had to take at every meal -- how hungry and irritable they made her.

And how sometimes a computer game made it all a little better.

"When I was on steroids, I was short-tempered," she said. "The game definitely helped. Just blasting the heck out of the bad stuff. It's revenge."

Tirabassi is talking about Re-Mission. That's the name of a computer game in which a character, Roxxi, fights different forms of cancer using everything from a chemoblaster to a stool softener.

The 18-year-old from Fonthill was one of 375 cancer patients across the U.S., Australia and Canada given the game as part of a 2004-05 study to see if playing a video game could improve how regularly youths with cancer took their meds, as well as their quality of life and stress levels.

Researchers found people who played Re-Mission an hour a week were 16 per cent more likely to take their cancer meds. The video game also increased patients' knowledge about the disease.

Results of the study were published in the August edition of the peer-reviewed journal Pediatrics.

"This is significant," said Kim Nagel, clinical research co-ordinator for pediatric oncology at McMaster Children's Hospital, one of six Canadian centres that ran the tests. Nagel said previous research shows teens and young adults often fail to take prescribed medications, especially pills.

"In the last 20 years, we've dramatically improved the treatment of childhood cancer, but the adolescent and young adult group hasn't shown the same improvement. We thought it was because of sub-optimal treatment. But it's because they are not taking their pills."

Nagel said teens are coping with many other issues -- boyfriends and girlfriends, peers, parents and transitions -- which could explain why they don't consistently take medication that could save their lives.

That's where Roxxi comes in. Gamers guide this tough-looking nanobot through the body. The goal is to zap cancer cells and bacteria without destroying healthy cells.

The game, developed by a California non-profit organization called HopeLab, has 20 different missions.

"It's funny, but still a really good learning experience for them," said Nagel, who talks about how Roxxi rides a surf wave of vomit when the patient is sick from chemo.

"The (kids) learned as they played. They learned what the medication was doing and they learned what would happen if they didn't take their medication."

Said Tirabassi: "It helped me to understand what was going on (in my body). Because every mission is different, you learn something new every time you play."

McMaster Children's Hospital is continuing to supply patients with the video game.

And Tirabassi -- now cancer-free and enrolled to start college this fall -- is still playing it.

"Some of the missions I swear are impossible because the cancer cells reproduce so rapidly," she said.

"But I'm still a kid at heart, so I am still gaming. It's either Re-Mission or The Sims."

cwhitwell@thespec.com

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