Therapeutic Digital Gaming and VR to Level-up Treatment for Addiction

Key Messages:

VR proposed alternative for addiction treatment

• “Researchers developing treatments for addiction are turning to virtual reality and gaming to help patients overcome their lack of impulse control and decrease the relapse rates.”
• “While there’s no substitute for counselling…it is important to find supplementary and easily accessible methods to beat [addiction]. EU researchers are therefore working to create more immersive experiences via digital formats to aid self-control as part of the addiction recovery process.”
• “The project is… using virtual reality (VR) to closer replicate the real-life environments in which people face temptations.”

Results

• “Participants who completed the training were found to perform better than control groups in a classical task used to test inhibition. “
• “Brain scans… discovered a rise in thickness of a prefrontal area of the brain known as the right inferior frontal gyrus…shown to be linked to inhibitory responses”
• “‘In the end, we will have data from different countries and can check whether it works like we hope,’ said Dr Ascone. ‘But patients like it and we hope we can do a planned three-month follow-up in most cases, because the three months after hospital discharge are often the most vulnerable.’”

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