The “phantom” pain of people with disabilities could disappear with the practice of a video game, according to results of a study published in the medical journal The Lancet.
Researchers at Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg, Örebro University Hospital in Stockholm, Sweden, and University Rehabilitation Institute in Ljubljana, Slovenia performed a trial with 14 arm amputee patients. These patients could not get rid of their phantom pain. Often times, amputees develop hypersensitivity which creates phantom pain on the amputated limb. They are caused by neurons which continue to send messages of pain.
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A car race to fight phantom pain
For the experiment, the volunteers had to play a car race with their mutilated arm.
After 12 sessions, the scientists observed that the intensity of their pain had decreased by 32% and the frequency of this suffering decreased by 61% during sleep and by 43% during the day. The experiment also enabled 4 patients on painkillers to reduce the dose of medication consumed.
“The results of our study suggest that this kind of video game could be effective in training the phantom limb,” said lead author Max Ortiz-Catalan, an electronics engineer specializing in prosthetics and teaching at the university in Gothenburg, Sweden.
The experiment being conclusive, the researchers declared to have set up a clinical trial of larger scale to confirm these first results.
“Our joint project has been incredibly rewarding, and we now intend to go further with a larger controlled clinical trial,” says Ortiz Catalan. “The control group will be treated with one of the current treatment methods for phantom pain. This time we will also include patients with leg amputations. More than 30 patients from different countries will participate, and we will offer more sessions. treatment to see if we can make the pain go away completely ”.
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