Cancer patients receiving chemotherapy infusions benefitted from a virtual reality experience that took them on tours of the canals of Venice, Italy; the Taj Mahal in Agra, India; and the Amazon River in Ecuador.
The distraction therapy decreased their pain and stress levels by statistically significant measures, according to a study by Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center researchers published in the Clinical Journal of Oncology Nursing. The patients also exhibited lower heart rates, reported high satisfaction with virtual reality and experienced no feelings of cybersickness.
The responses of the patients were compared with those in a control group who engaged in the typical activities of chemotherapy patients, such as watching television, reading or talking with appointment companions.
The patients in the virtual reality arm of the study had a median heart rate of 71 compared to 75 for the control group. When asked to report pain and stress levels on a 10-point scale, patients in the virtual reality arm reported a range of 0-5 for stress compared to 0-10 for those in the control group. The overall estimated difference for stress was 1.5 points, while the difference for pain was 0.7.
“The advances in virtual reality technology over the last 10 years has made it more useful than ever in providing a diversionary tool for patients experiencing pain or anxiety,” said Cody Stansel, MSN, RN, NE-BC, administrative director of nursing at Vanderbilt-Ingram, the study’s corresponding author.
The authors noted that although the effectiveness of virtual reality has been demonstrated among diverse patient populations, few studies exist evaluating it for adult cancer patients.
They also noted that improvements in virtual reality technology had rendered early research obsolete. The Vanderbilt-Ingram study evaluated 90 patients with 45 experiencing virtual reality distraction therapy and 45 in the control group. The age range was 20-82 for the patients.
The virtual reality experience lasted 12 minutes. The research team received no funding support for the study, but the headsets were loaned from Vanderbilt University. The 90 participants in the study were recruited and evaluated from November 2021 through December 2023.
Nurses can easily incorporate virtual reality as a distraction therapy because the headsets are “widely accessible, relatively affordable and simple to use,” the authors stated.
Other authors are Alexander McLeod; Shubham Gulati, MS; Catherine Ivory, PhD, NI-BC, NEA-BC; Mary Dietrich, PhD, MS; Heather Murray; Nathan Zang; Krish Shah; Hari Patel; Kristin Pegram, RN, OCN; and Wendy Howell, MSN, RN, OCN.
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