Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jul 7, 2021
Date Accepted: Nov 21, 2021
Date Submitted to PubMed: Dec 20, 2021
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Changes in Prefrontal Cortex Activity According to Virtual Reality (VR) Treatment in Patients with Social Anxiety Disorder: fNIRS measurement for VR-derived video exposure
ABSTRACT
Background:
Attempts to use virtual reality (VR) as a treatment for social anxiety disorder (SAD) have been around for a long time. Many researchers identified the effects of VR exposure therapy in SAD patients. However, there are still not many systemic studies on the effectiveness of VR treatment in patients with SAD.
Objective:
The aim of this study is to identify the effectiveness of the participatory VR exposure therapy for SAD. It is achieved by analyzing prefrontal cortex brain activities using a portable functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS).
Methods:
The patients with SAD (n=40) were provided with a total of six sessions of VR treatment solution that was developed for exposure to social situations with recording system of participant’s self-introduction in VR. After each VR treatment session, the first-person view (video 1) and third-person view (video 2) clips of participant’s self-introduction were automatically generated. The functional activities of prefrontal regions were measured by fNIRS while seeing video 1 and 2 with cognitive task, before and after whole VR treatment sessions, and after first session of VR treatment. We compared the data of fNIRS between SAD patients and healthy controls (HC) (n=34).
Results:
We found that reduction of activities of right frontopolar prefrontal cortex (FPC) in HC was greater than in SAD group in baseline (t=-2.01, p<0.05). Comparing the frontal cortex activation before and after VR treatment sessions in SAD group, there were significant differences in FPC (right: t=-2.93, p<0.001, left: t=-2.25, p<0.05) and orbitofrontal cortex (OC) (right: t=-2.10, p<0.05, left: t=-2.21, p<0.05) while seeing video 2.
Conclusions:
We could find changes of brain activities on FPC and OC while seeing VR-derived video clips, and that was correlated with some psychological states. It could be a clue to understand the mechanism of effectiveness of VR treatment for SAD. Clinical Trial: CRIS Registration Number-KCT0003854
Citation
