Participants
delirium, anxiety, epilepsy, Meticillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, dementia, pain, hearing/visual impairment, depression, Chronic pain
RECRUITMENT, EPILEPSY
The study population comprised patients of 18 years and older with nonspecific CLBP reporting an average pain score of 4 and higher on an 11-point Likert scale in the week preceding enrollment. Chronic pain was defined as pain lasting for at least 3 months. Other inclusion criteria were: (1) the patient has an estimated waiting period of at least 6 weeks on the day of recruitment on the waiting list; (2) the patient is not yet receiving treatment, apart from analgesics or physiotherapy; (3) the patient did not receive any invasive treatment for his chronic nonspecific low-back pain in the last year; (4) patients read and understand the Dutch language. Exclusion criteria were: (1) the patient has radicular pain that is worse than the CLBP; (2) inclusion in another trial to evaluate new ways of treating pain; (3) the presence of severe anxiety or depression; (4) not being able to handle VR due to delirium, dementia, epilepsy, severe hearing/visual impairment, skin of the head or face not intact, and high risk of Meticillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. Patients were recruited from a waiting list for advanced pain treatment in a pain clinic of a large teaching hospital. No sample size calculation was performed for this pilot study, but we considered 20 in each group to be sufficient for our primary study aims to investigate the preliminary effectiveness of VR on health-related quality of life in this population.