'I Dreamed of My Hands and Arms Moving Again': A Case Series Investigating the Effect of Immersive Virtual Reality on Phantom Limb Pain Alleviation
| Autor: | Bifa Fan, Kunlin Wei, Diane Gromala, Owen Williamson, Xinxing Wang, Xin Tong, Yiyang Cai |
|---|---|
| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: |
medicine.medical_specialty
serious games media_common.quotation_subject Phantom limb Illusion Virtual reality lcsh:RC346-429 03 medical and health sciences 0302 clinical medicine Physical medicine and rehabilitation Motor imagery motor imagery medicine Spinal cord injury brachial plexus nerve injury lcsh:Neurology. Diseases of the nervous system 030304 developmental biology media_common 0303 health sciences business.industry Chronic pain Motor control immersive virtual reality Brief Research Report medicine.disease motor execution body regions phantom limb pain Neurology Anxiety Neurology (clinical) medicine.symptom business 030217 neurology & neurosurgery |
| Zdroj: | Frontiers in Neurology, Vol 11 (2020) Frontiers in Neurology |
| ISSN: | 1664-2295 |
| DOI: | 10.3389/fneur.2020.00876/full |
| Popis: | Phantom limb pain (PLP) is a type of chronic pain that follows limb amputation, brachial plexus avulsion injury, or spinal cord injury. Treating PLP is a well-known challenge. Currently, virtual reality (VR) interventions are attracting increasing attention because they show promising analgesic effects. However, most previous studies of VR interventions were conducted with a limited number of patients in a single trial. Few studies explored questions such as how multiple VR sessions might affect pain over time, or if a patient's ability to move their phantom limb may affect their PLP. Here we recruited five PLP patients to practice two motor tasks for multiple VR sessions over 6 weeks. In VR, patients “inhabit” a virtual body or avatar, and the movements of their intact limbs are mirrored in the avatar, providing them with the illusion that their limbs respond as if they were both intact and functional. We found that repetitive exposure to our VR intervention led to reduced pain and improvements in anxiety, depression, and a sense of embodiment of the virtual body. Importantly, we also found that their ability to move their phantom limbs improved as quantified by shortened motor imagery time with the impaired limb. Although the limited sample size prevents us from performing a correlational analysis, our findings suggest that providing PLP patients with sensorimotor experience for the impaired limb in VR appears to offer long-term benefits for patients and that these benefits may be related to changes in their control of the phantom limbs' movement. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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