Sensory-motor training with virtual reality as a complementary intervention to manual therapy for persistent non-specific neck pain: a randomized controlled trial.
Daniele Emedoli, Federica Alemanno, Sandro Iannaccone and 6 others
PMID 38922315WHAT IT FOUND
Adding virtual reality to a neck exercise program did not improve patient-reported disability, pain, or fear of movement over the same exercises done without VR.
Both groups improved. The only between-group differences were in objective head-movement measures.
Key findings
01The primary outcome, the Neck Disability Index, showed no significant difference between the VR and non-VR groups after six weeks. Both groups improved significantly from baseline.
02Both groups received identical 15-minute manual therapy followed by 30 minutes of the same sensorimotor neck exercises. The only difference was that the VR group performed the exercises with real-time visual feedback from a virtual environment.
03The VR group showed significantly better maximum rotation range of motion, a better ratio of primary to secondary movement during rotation, and faster lateral bending velocity than the non-VR group, after Bonferroni correction.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for PTs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
No follow-up beyond the six-week treatment period, so it is unknown whether any between-group differences in movement measures would have persisted. Single centre with a small sample (40 participants) and 7 dropouts, six of them due to the pandemic. Participants and the physiotherapists delivering the exercises could not be blinded to whether VR was present. The VR system was a specific commercial product (Khymeia VRRS), so the findings may not generalise to other VR setups. The study was conducted over a period that included the pandemic, which affected recruitment and retention.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflict of interest with any financial organization. No specific funding source is named in the text.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the between-group differences in head-movement range and speed as evidence that VR improves neck pain outcomes. The primary outcome, patient-reported disability, showed no significant difference between groups (P = 0.820). Both groups also received the same manual therapy and the same exercises, so the improvement seen in both groups cannot be attributed to VR. The VR group's advantage was confined to objective movement measures, not to how patients reported their pain, disability, or fear of movement.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →