Exploring the Potential of Immersive Virtual Reality (VR) as a tool to enhance cognitive functions and alleviate...

People with multiple sclerosis (PwMS) suffer cognitive and motor impairments that significantly impact their work life and daily functioning. Because virtual reality (VR) technologies have shown promise in the field of neurorehabilitation, in this study we developed a VR-based cognitive training program and assessed whether it could improve cognitive functioning in a cohort of PwMS (n = 33) and healthy control participants (n = 26). We observed that, in both groups of participants, repeated practice led to a day-by-day increase in correct responses and a progressive reduction in errors in the VR task. More importantly, as revealed by comparisons of the participants' pre- and post-training scores, practice in the VR task also significantly improved performance in non-trained neuropsychological tests working assessing memory, information processing speed, and upper limb motor functions. Taken together, these findings suggest that training programs using VR technologies can positively impact both cognitive and motor functions in multiple sclerosis, thus offering new tools to prevent or attenuate the cognitive and motor decline experienced by PwMS.