Realidade virtual no controlo da dor e do distress associados a procedimentos dolorosos em crianças e adolescentes: meta análise

Abstract

Distraction is frequently used as a coping strategy for managing the stress and pain related to medical procedures. Recent studies have made use of virtual reality as a new distraction strategy and their results suggest that this type of distraction has a great analgesic effect.

The present study is a systematic review of the literature with a meta analysis to evaluate the effectiveness of virtual reality as a way to distract children and teenagers who undertake painful procedures.

The studies selected included children and teenagers between 5 and 19 years of age who were submitted to painful procedures. Only clinical trials with a random sampling and a minimum of 5 participants in the treatment and control groups were eligible.

The studies included had their quality evaluated by means of the Oxford Quality Scale. All the analyses used the Mean Difference (MD) and Confidence Intervals (CI) of 95%, calculated with Review Manager 5.0 software.

Five (5) clinical trials were included making a total of 136 participants. Together these studies encompassed 70 experimental treatments and 66 control treatments. The most studied context was in oncology during a lumbar puncture and subcutaneous puncture for access to a pre-implanted catheter. The remaining contexts of use were of burns during the dressing change and during complementary diagnostic tests with peripheral venous puncture.

The results of the meta analysis confirm the efficacy of distraction by means of virtual reality in the management of pain and distress in children and teenagers when submitted to painful invasive medical procedures. However, it is necessary to continue to investigate this intervention so as to gather stronger evidence.