Effectiveness of virtual reality in reducing preoperative anxiety in adults: A systematic review and meta‐analysis

AIM: To evaluate the impact of a virtual reality (VR) intervention on adult patients' preoperative anxiety, heart rate, respiration rate and blood pressure. DESIGN: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials (RCTs). DATA SOURCES: A librarian-designed search of the Cochrane Library, PubMed, Web of Science, EMBASE, CINAHL, CBM, CNKI and Wanfang databases was conducted to identify research studies in English or Chinese on RCTs from their inception to 31 May 2022. Detailed search strategies and the checklist are provieded in Supplementary files S1 and S2. REVIEW METHODS: Two researchers independently screened eligible studies. The Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions was used to assess the risk of bias in the included studies. A fixed- or random-effects meta-analysis model was used to determine the pooled mean difference based on the results of the heterogeneity test. RESULTS: This study included 11 articles with a total of 892 participants. VR distraction comprised five studies, and VR exposure consisted of six studies. The results indicated that VR could reduce preoperative anxiety in adult patients and VR exposure seems to be more effective. The results also indicated that VR intervention can effectively reduce patients' heart rate and blood pressure compared to traditional intervention methods, but had no significant effect on respiration rate. CONCLUSION: VR technology could relieve preoperative anxiety in adult patients through distraction or exposure. More well-designed RCTs containing a wider range of surgical types are needed to verify our findings before we can make strong recommendations. IMPACT: Our systematic review and meta-analysis show a positive effect of VR distraction and exposure interventions in reducing preoperative anxiety in adult patients. We suggest incorporating VR into preoperative procedures as an auxiliary way to reduce negative emotions in eligible patients. NO PATIENT OR PUBLIC CONTRIBUTION: Our paper is a systematic review and meta-analysis and such details do not apply to our work.