Abstract: | Purpose To investigate whether a virtual reality game can reduce the chronic nonspecific low back pain and help patients recover. Methods In this randomized controlled trial, the patients with the chronic nonspecific low back pain were taken as the experimental group (n = 40) and underwent a period of exercise in an immersive virtual reality game, while those performed the same exercises without VR games were taken as the control group (n = 40) so as to investigate whether VR distraction had a hypoalgesia effect during and immediately after the exercises, and whether it reduced the time spent thinking of pain during the exercises. Thereafter, we further explored whether pain-related fear, pain catastrophizing and baseline pain intensity moderated the effects of VR distraction. Results The results of repeated measures analysis of variance showed that the pain intensity among the patients of the experimental group was the main effect, and time and pain intensity had an interactive effect. The time to think about pain during the exercise was significantly less than that of the control group (Experimental group M = 32.26, SD = 12.32; Control group M = 51.21, SD = 17.18; t80 = 5.80, P < 0.0001), both had an analgesic effect during the exercise (Cohen’s d = 0.86) and after the exercise (Cohen’s d = 0.46). The results of analysis of variance showed that fear of pain, catastrophic pain, and initial pain intensity all have the main effects, but there was no interaction on thinking time (all p values > 0.05), and it was believed that it did not affect the distracting analgesic effect of virtual reality. Conclusion Virtual reality is effective in distracting attention and inducing pain reduction and it indicates that immersive virtual reality games can be used to relieve the pain of patients with chronic non-specific low back pain during the exercise and help them recover their health. |