Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jun 8, 2021
Date Accepted: Aug 12, 2021
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Effects of virtual reality training on upper limb function, balance, and walking ability in stroke patients: a systematic review and meta-meta analysis
ABSTRACT
Background:
Virtual reality (VR) training is a promising intervention strategy, which has been utilized in healthcare fields like stroke rehabilitation and psychotherapy. The current study suggests that, VR training is effective in improving the locomotor ability of individuals with stroke patients.
Objective:
This is the first meta-meta-analysis of the effects of virtual reality on motor function in stroke patients. This study aimed to systematically summarize and quantify the present meta-analyses results of VR training, and produce high-quality meta-meta-analysis results to obtain a more accurate prediction.
Methods:
We searched four online databases (Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed, and Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure) for the meta-analysis studies. After accounting for the overlap, ten studies (almost 550 stroke patients) were obtained. Based on the meta-meta-analysis of these patients, this study quantified the impact of VR training on stroke patients’ motor performance, mainly including upper limb function, balance, and walking ability. We combined the effects under the random effect model and pooled the estimates as standardized mean differences (SMD).
Results:
The results of the meta-meta analysis showed that VR intervention effectively improved the upper limb function (SMD= 4.606, 95% confidence interval (Cl): 2.733-6.479, P< 0.05) and balance (SMD=2.101, 95%Cl：0.202-4.000, P< 0.05) of stroke patients. However, the results showed considerable heterogeneity, and thus, may need to be treated with caution. Due to the limited research, the meta-meta-analysis of walking ability was not performed.
Conclusions:
These findings represent a comprehensive body of high-quality evidence that, VR interventions were more effective at improving the upper limb function and balance of stroke patients.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.