Virtual Reality for Decreasing Procedural Pain during Botulinum Toxin Injection Related to Spasticity Treatment in Adults: A Pilot Study

David, R.; Dumas, A.; Ojardias, E.; Duval, S.; Ounajim, A.; Perrochon, A.; Luque-Moreno, C.; Moens, M.; Goudman, L.; Rigoard, P.; Billot, M. Virtual Reality for Decreasing Procedural Pain during Botulinum Toxin Injection Related to Spasticity Treatment in Adults: A Pilot Study. Medicina 2024, 60, 23. David, R.; Dumas, A.; Ojardias, E.; Duval, S.; Ounajim, A.; Perrochon, A.; Luque-Moreno, C.; Moens, M.; Goudman, L.; Rigoard, P.; Billot, M. Virtual Reality for Decreasing Procedural Pain during Botulinum Toxin Injection Related to Spasticity Treatment in Adults: A Pilot Study. Medicina 2024, 60, 23.

Abstract

Background and Objectives: Botulinum toxin injections are commonly used for the treatment of spasticity. However, injection procedures are associated with pain and procedural anxiety. While pharmacological approaches are commonly used to reduce these, inno-vative technology might be considered as a potential non-pharmacological alternative. Given this context, immersive virtual reality (VR) has shown effectiveness in the man-agement of procedural pain[1]. Our retrospective pilot study aimed to assess the potential added value of virtual reality in the management of pain and anxiety during intra-muscular injections of botulinum toxin. Materials and Methods: Twenty-one adult patients receiving botulinum toxin injections were included. A numerical rating scale was used to assess pain and anxiety during the injection procedure. The patient reported the pain experienced during previous injections without VR before injection and the pain expe-rienced in the current procedure with VR after the end of the procedure. Level of satis-faction of VR experience, if they agreed to reuse VR for the subsequent toxin botulinum injection, and if they would recommend VR to other patients were assessed. Results: The use of virtual reality showed a decrease of 1.8 pain-related points compared to without technology. No significant improvement in the level of anxiety was reported. Patients were very satisfied by their VR experience (7.9 out of 10) and would agree to reuse VR in their next injection procedure (88%) and to recommend the use of VR in other patients (100%). Conclusion: VR was useful for managing procedural pain related to botulinum toxin injection in adults, with a high level of satisfaction reported by the patient. VR should be considered as a valuable alternative to pharmacological approach to manage procedural pain during Botulinum toxin injection in adults.

Keywords

Central Nervous System Disease, Complementary Therapies, Virtual Reality, Pain, Anxiety

Subject

Medicine and Pharmacology, Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine

Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Download PDF

Comments (0)

Not displayed online.

Importance: How significant is the paper to the field?

Outstanding/highlight paper

Significant contribution

Incremental contribution

No contribution

I am not qualified to judge

Soundness of evidence/arguments presented:

Conclusions well supported

Most conclusions supported (minor revision needed)

Incomplete evidence (major revision needed)

Hypothesis, unsupported conclusions, or proof-of-principle

I am not qualified to judge

Please leave your comment to this article below.

Mathematical equations can be typed in either LaTeX formats \\[ ... \\] or $$ ... $$, or MathML format <math> ... </math>. Try the LaTeX or MathML example.

Type equation:

Preview:

Copy equation into message below

Close menu

Please click a symbol to insert it into the message box below:

Please enter the link here:

Please enter a valid URL

Optionally, you can enter text that should appear as linked text:

Copy link into message below

Close menu

Please enter or paste the URL to the image here (please only use links to jpg/jpeg, png and gif images):

Please enter a valid URL

Copy image into message below

Close menu

Type author name or keywords to filter the list of references in this group (you can add a new citation under Bibliography):

No existing citations in Discussion Group

Wikify editor is a simple editor for wiki-style mark-up. It was written by MDPI for Sciforum in 2014. The rendering of the mark-up is based on Wiky.php with some tweaks. Rendering of mathematical equations is done with MathJax. Please send us a message for support or for reporting bugs.

Close menu

Please declare any conflicts of interest you may have with this paper, financial or otherwise.

I do not have a conflict of interest

I would like to declare a conflict of interest

Display my name on the website Send my name and email address to the authors

Captcha

Renew

I accept the following conditions:

Comments must follow the standards of professional discourse and should focus on the scientific content of the article. Insulting or offensive language, personal attacks and off-topic remarks will not be permitted. Comments must be written in English. Preprints reserves the right to remove comments without notice. Readers who post comments are obliged to declare any competing interests, financial or otherwise.

We encourage comments and feedback from a broad range of readers. See criteria for comments and our Diversity statement.

Leave a public comment
Send a private comment to the author(s)

* All users must log in before leaving a comment

what’s this?

Add a record of this review to Publons to track and showcase your reviewing expertise across the world’s journals.

Downloads 0

Comments 0

Metrics 0

Get PDF Cite Share 0

Bookmark BibSonomy Mendeley Reddit Delicious

Alerts

Notify me about updates to this article or when a peer-reviewed version is published.

Preprints.org is a free preprint server subsidized by MDPI in Basel, Switzerland.

MDPI Initiatives

SciProfiles
Sciforum
Encyclopedia
MDPI Books
Scilit
Proceedings
JAMS

Important links

How it Works
Advisory Board
FAQ
Friendly Journals
Instructions for Authors
About
Statistics

Choose the area that interest you and we will send you notifications of new preprints at your preferred frequency.

Disclaimer

We use cookies on our website to ensure you get the best experience.
Read more about our cookies here.

RSS feed for

Preprints: The Multidisciplinary Preprint Platform

Paste the URL in your RSS reader:

https://www.preprints.org/rss

If you want to subscribe our website in subject-wide, you could find the URL by choosing in the following:

https://www.preprints.org/rss

Please note that by using ScienceDirect RSS feeds, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.