Discussion
painful memories, anxiety, pain, HMD, depression
Several prior studies have assessed the efficacy of VR over TAU, especially for burn wound care, thus using VR with a scope directed toward distraction without a hypnosis state. Two reviews highlight VR-associated reductions of pain and anxiety [In terms of pain, episiotomy repair procedures have demonstrated significant differences between VR and standard care [In the fields of venipuncture or port access procedures, prior studies presented equivocal results when comparing VR and TAU. Two studies reported significant pain reduction [As previously described [Professional VR users may also try to enhance the efficiency of hypnotic analgesia. Selecting only patients with high hypnotic susceptibility, using a scale such as the Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility [In terms of anxiety, as in our study, a large study of venipuncture found a significant reduction of anxiety between VR and standard of care groups using VAS (1.9 vs. 2.48) [Negative memories linked to prior traumatizing procedures may lead to difficulties in patient management. Although our results did not demonstrate an effect on painful memories (which could be linked to the low procedural pain), lowering anxiety represents a cardinal management point, since higher anxiety levels are a unique factor generating negative pain memories [Immersive reality may lead to cybersickness due to sensory mismatch, postural instability, and gravity discrepancy [Qualitatively, the participants tolerated the HMD, as there was no need to remove it during any procedure. Similar to previous findings [There was no difference in procedure time, but all procedures performed under VA-HYPO led to patient dissociation from the intervenient (the patient was focused on the virtual session with minimal external interactions). This may contribute to the facilitation and securing of the operator’s work, by eliminating micro-interpersonal interruptions during the procedure [Within the context of interventional radiology, our results support the use of VA-HYPO. As previously mentioned [This study has several limitations. First, the “case mix” of procedures that have been performed is not fully representative of the range of endovascular interventions realized in interventional radiology. Second, the STAI questionnaire has some limitations in the discrimination between anxiety and depression, and may have poor discriminant validity regarding anxiety in elderly persons [