Mosso José L, Gorini Alessandra, De La Cerda Gustavo, Obrador Tomas, Almazan Andrew, Mosso Dejanira, Nieto Jesus J, Riva Giuseppe
General and Regional Hospital No. 25 IMSS.
Stud Health Technol Inform. 2009;142:195-200.
When undergo ambulatory surgical operations, the majority of patients experience high level of anxiety. Different experimental studies have shown that distraction techniques are effective in reducing pain and related anxiety. Since Virtual reality (VR) has been demonstrated a good distraction technique, it has been repeatedly used in hospital contexts for reducing pain in burned patients, but it has never been used during surgical operations. With the present randomized controlled study we intended to verify the effectiveness of VR in reducing anxiety in patients undergoing ambulatory operations under local or regional anaesthesia. In particular, we measured the degree to which anxiety associated with surgical intervention was reduced by distracting patients with immersive VR provided through a cell phone connected to an HMD compared to a no-distraction control condition. A significant reduction of anxiety was obtained after 45 minutes of operation in the VR group, but not in the control group and, after 90 minutes, the reduction was larger in the experimental group than in other one. In conclusion, this study presents an innovative promising technique to reduce anxiety during surgical interventions, even if more studies are necessary to investigate its effectiveness in other kinds of operations and in larger numbers of patients.
在接受门诊外科手术时，大多数患者会经历高度焦虑。不同的实验研究表明，分心技术在减轻疼痛和相关焦虑方面是有效的。由于虚拟现实（VR）已被证明是一种很好的分心技术，它已在医院环境中多次用于减轻烧伤患者的疼痛，但从未在外科手术中使用过。通过本随机对照研究，我们旨在验证VR在减轻接受局部或区域麻醉的门诊手术患者焦虑方面的有效性。特别是，与无分心对照条件相比，我们测量了通过连接到头戴式显示器（HMD）的手机为患者提供沉浸式VR来分散注意力，与手术干预相关的焦虑降低的程度。VR组在手术45分钟后焦虑显著降低，而对照组则没有，并且在90分钟后，实验组的焦虑降低幅度大于另一组。总之，本研究提出了一种创新的、有前景的技术来减轻手术干预期间的焦虑，尽管还需要更多研究来调查其在其他类型手术和更多患者中的有效性。
