Virtual reality may soon help cancer patients recovering from stem cell procedures.
Healthcare technology company Rocket VR Health — working with Massachusetts General Hospital—is developing a virtual reality therapy designed to improve quality of life for blood cancer patients undergoing hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT).
HCT can treat leukemia, myeloma, lymphoma, and other blood and immune disorders that affect the bone marrow. Patients typically spend about 28 days in the hospital, unable to leave their rooms because their immune systems are severely weakened while their marrow regenerates. This isolation can cause significant short‑ and long‑term distress that affects physical and mental well‑being.
The new VR‑based treatment combines psychoeducation, therapy, and relaxation exercises in a self‑guided immersive environment. It aims to help patients feel connected to the outside world while they remain confined to their rooms.
Research shows that patients who receive integrated psychological support during hospitalization have fewer symptoms of depression and PTSD than those who receive standard transplant care alone.
Rocket VR Health hopes to create a therapy that hospitals can easily provide, using clinically validated psychological approaches delivered through accessible VR—not fully immersive systems—to make supportive care more effective and widely available.
Stressed is highly related to low immunity to fight against infection diseases and cancers. When the people are in stress, hormone corticosteroid is released to suppress the effectiveness of the immune system (e. g. low number of lymphocytes). Substantial evidence proved that a correlation between stress and low immune function (NK activity, proliferative and mitogen response). Evidence showed that stress in man is closely related to the number or percent of circulating white blood cells, immunoglobulin level and antibody titer to virus infection. However, immune response is varied with stressor duration. Results of clinical investigation in breast cancer patients revealed that patients with high initial subjective stress showed poor initial T cell blastogenesis. Whereas, patients who exhibited an early of rapid decline in subjective stress showed rapid Improvement in NK cytotoxicity (NKCC) . Hence, NK and T cells are sensitive to different aspects of stress response while T cells blastogenesis correlated with initial subjective stress, NKCC correlated with change (improvement ) in subjective stress.
Most patients after receiving cancer treatment tend to have low immune function to fight against infection diseases. The recovery of immune response is crucial for patients to improve their immunity to prevent infection diseases and regrowth of cancers. Patients with long-term hospitalization tend to develop stress, this may further delay the recovery of immune system. Therefore, virtual reality therapy is an alternative approach to reduce the stress of cancer patients undergoing cancer treatment.