Effects of Applying Virtual Reality for Immersive Anxiety Reduction in Dental Patients

Background: There is a lack of cost-effective solutions to improve mental wellness, anxiety, for anyone seeking medical or dental procedures, chemotherapy, or even MRI. Not much data exists on mental wellness solutions for patients, either preor postprocedure. In addition, uncontrolled anxiety can lead to physiological side effects of tachycardia, excessive bleeding, pro-longed procedure, care avoidance and decreased health. Prior research has shown some success using Virtual Reality interventions for improving anxiety disorders. This study further examined an innovative VR relaxation intervention aiming to decrease anxiety in dental patients. Methods: After IRB approval 20 dental patients participated in the study. Participants completed a 10-item STAI questionnaire and then spent 10-15 minutes immersed in a relaxing virtual environment. Participants then filled out another 10-item STAI questionnaire, the Corah’s Dental Anxiety questionnaire, and a user experience questionnaire. Results: There was a high significant decrease in anxiety between pre-intervention (M=18.53, SD=4.29) and post-intervention (M=15.63, SD=3.63) measures (p<0.01). User acceptance was high, with a large majority of patients reporting feeling relaxed and wanting to use the virtual reality technology again. Conclusions: These results suggested the novel VR wellness technology can be very effective at reducing pre-dental procedure anxiety in patients. This intervention can be beneficial in the field of anxiety reduction.