VR treatment helps hospitalised cancer patients feel less pain
According to recent research, an immersive virtual reality experience dramatically lessened cancer-related discomfort compared to a tablet-based, two-dimensional encounter.
A recent study found that hospitalised cancer patients who experienced virtual reality (VR) had far greater pain reduction than those who saw two-dimensional guided imagery.
The study evaluated whether virtual reality (VR) might reduce acute and chronic pain among hospitalised cancer patients. It was published in Cancer, the journal of the American Cancer Society (ACS). The American Cancer Society (ACS) has released its most recent statistics, which projects that in 2024 there will be slightly more than 2 million new instances of cancer identified and 611,720 cancer-related deaths in the US. Nevertheless, there has been significant advancement in the field of cancer therapy, as seen by the 1.6% annual decline in the cancer mortality rate from 2012 to 2021.
The study found that cancer patients frequently experience discomfort. Early in the course of the disease, around half of cancer patients have pain; by the late stages, this number jumps to 75% of patients. Acute pain is defined as intense and lasting less time than other forms of pain; chronic pain is defined as mild to severe and lasting more than three months; and breakthrough pain is defined as happening when the patient takes pain medication on a regular basis.
The use of virtual reality to assist with pain management is growing. Few studies, meanwhile, specifically look at whether it helps lessen pain associated with cancer. In order to assess VR’s effectiveness in reducing moderate-to-severe cancer-related pain, researchers from Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Centre and MedStar Health Research Institute launched a randomised controlled experiment (RCT).
The RCT was conducted at the MedStar Washington Hospital Centre in Washington, D.C., between March 2021 and June 2022. They included 127 adult cancer patients who were admitted and reported feeling pain in the previous 24 hours with a severity of four or greater, on a pain scale of zero to ten, with ten being the greatest conceivable pain.
The patients were split into two groups. One group used the Meta Oculus Quest 2 to get ten minutes of immersive VR distraction therapy, while the other group used a portable tablet to receive ten minutes of two-dimensional guided imagery distraction therapy.
Sixty-three of the 127 patients in the analysis were in the tablet arm and sixty-four were in the VR arm. The mean basal pain load for the VR group was 6.8, while it was 6.8 for the smartphone group.
The researchers discovered that the self-reported pain ratings of both groups decreased statistically significantly. On the other hand, from baseline to post-intervention, individuals in the VR group saw an average drop in pain levels of 1.4, compared to 0.7 for those in the tablet arm.
Furthermore, the VR group showed a greater improvement in follow-up self-reported pain ratings than the tablet group did.
The study also revealed that a greater number of participants in the tablet group assessed using the device as simple, whereas a greater number of participants in the VR group assessed using it as challenging. Nonetheless, most participants in both groups said that they would be willing to use their respective gadgets once more.
According to the researchers, even though participants rated VR as more difficult to use than tablet use, this did not negatively impact satisfaction with overall pain management and did not barrier participants’ willingness to use VR. Ease of use will probably increase as portability and functionality of commercially available devices are improved.
VR is becoming more widely used in healthcare, with healthcare provider organisations utilising it to treat social isolation, pain, and anxiety. Consequently, government organisations are moving towards reimbursement routes.
A virtual reality programme was given its first-ever Healthcare Common Procedure Coding System (HCPCS) Level II code by the Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) last year. The flagship product of virtual reality therapeutics provider AppliedVR, the RelieVRx programme, is classified as durable medical equipment (DME) under the code. This establishes a more certain route to Medicare coverage eligibility.
