“I Dreamed of My Hands and Arms Moving Again”: A Case Series Investigating the Effect of Immersive Virtual Reality on Phantom Limb Pain Alleviation

Frontiers in Neurology

Xinxing Wang¹  Bifa Fan¹  Owen Williamson²  Yiyang Cai²  Kunlin Wei³  Xin Tong⁴  Diane Gromala⁴ 

[1] China-Japan Friendship Hospital, Beijing, China;Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia;Motor Control Lab, School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China;School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University, Surrey, BC, Canada;

关键词: immersive virtual reality;    phantom limb pain;    motor execution;    motor imagery;    brachial plexus nerve injury;    serious games;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fneur.2020.00876

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

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.

【 授权许可】

Unknown