Effectiveness of virtual reality distraction in reducing anxiety among children with neurodevelopmental disorders...

In dentistry, managing anxious children is a daily challenge. Anxiety, affecting 10-20% of children, poses a barrier to care. This issue is exacerbated by deinstitutionalization and the law for equal rights, exposing orthodontists to a new patient group combining disability-related traits and heightened anxiety. Faced with anxious children, orthodontists have various management strategies. However, conventional behavioral techniques (CBT) have shown limits in children with neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD), contributing to disparities in access to care. Practitioners' reluctance to treat these patients underscores the need for ongoing training and tailored approaches. Emerging techniques combining virtual reality (VR) and hypnosis have proven effective in reducing anxiety in children. However, their effectiveness in children with NDD remains underexplored, despite independent successes of hypnosis and VR in other contexts.

In this context, we conducted a prospective randomized controlled trial at Bretonneau Hospital to evaluate the effectiveness of VR distraction in children aged 6 to 18 with NDD during orthodontic assessments.

The results indicate that VR distraction is similarly effective to CBT in reducing anxiety, although the small sample size may limit the generalization of these results. The findings suggest that VR could be a promising technique for alleviating anxiety in children with NDD during orthodontic assessments.

These preliminary results suggest that virtual reality may serve as a viable alternative approach to CBT for reducing anxiety in children with NDD during orthodontic procedures. Further studies are required to validate these findings in larger cohorts.