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Study: Virtual reality may help relieve pain during childbirth

Immersion in virtual reality may relieve some of the pain of contractions before childbirth, a small study suggests. In a half-hour test among 40 hospitalised women in labor, those who used VR headsets that provided relaxing scenes and messages reported pain reductions compared with those who didn’t get headsets, researchers said in a presentation at the annual meeting of the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine in Grapevine, Texas.




The next step is to test the technology for longer periods in laboring women. To test the VR headsets, study leader Dr Melissa Wong, an obstetrician-gynecologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles , and her colleagues recruited women who were in the hospital to have their first child and who hadn’t yet taken any pain relief drugs.

All of the participants were having contractions at least every five minutes and all of them scored their pain level at between 4 and 7 on a 10-point scale. Those who used VR headsets for up to 30 minutes during contractions reported an average reduction in pain level of 0.52 at the end of that period, while the control group that didn’t get the headsets reported an average increase in pain of 0.58

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