Virtual Reality Gives Spinal Cord Stimulation a Boost
For patients receiving spinal cord stimulation (SCS) for chronic pain, integration with an immersive virtual reality (VR) system – allowing patients to see as well as feel the effects of electrical stimulation on a virtual image of their own body – can enhance the pain-relieving effectiveness of SCS, reports a study in
PAIN, the official publication of the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP), published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer.
The integrated SCS-VR approach improves pain control over SCS alone, with fast-acting and long-lasting effects that may increase with repeated use, according to the new collaborative research by Olaf Blanke, MD, of Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Geneva, Switzerland, Ali Rezai, MD, of West Virginia University Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute, and Vibhor Krishna MD, PhD, of the Ohio State University and their colleagues.