Main outcome
anxiety, pain
Our hypothesis that a higher level of immersion would lead to better distraction and, as a consequence, a greater reduction of anxiety and/or pain, proved not to be supported by our findings. On the contrary, the results revealed a significant decrease in anxiety among patients in the AD group compared to those in the AVD group (Previous studies have established positive effects for both distraction methods to reduce anxiety and pain in clinical settings [To date, only a few studies have compared music and video to distract patients during medical procedures and investigate these tools’ impact on anxiety and pain [The AVD group had significantly more female patients compared to the music group. Studies indicate that females have a higher sensitivity to anxiety than males [Studies have assessed the relevance of familiarity and preference of type of content for relaxation [Indeed, in medical virtual reality (VR) applications, having a choice of scenery has been shown to influence and alleviate anxiety and pain [