Virtual Reality Combined With Psychoeducation to Improve Emotional Well-Being in Informal Caregivers of Alzheimer's Disease Patients: Rationale and Study Design of a Randomized Controlled Trial.
Alzheimer's disease
caregiver burden
empathy
e‐health
functional connectivity
informal caregiver
virtual reality
Journal
International journal of geriatric psychiatry
ISSN: 1099-1166
Titre abrégé: Int J Geriatr Psychiatry
Pays: England
ID NLM: 8710629
Informations de publication
Date de publication:
Sep 2024
Sep 2024
Historique:
revised:
23
08
2024
received:
26
01
2024
accepted:
28
08
2024
medline:
15
9
2024
pubmed:
15
9
2024
entrez:
13
9
2024
Statut:
ppublish
Résumé
Care for community-dwelling people with dementia is frequently delegated to relatives, who find themselves in the role of informal caregivers with no practical management knowledge. This situation exposes caregivers to increased risk for emotional wellbeing. The current study aims to test whether the integration of the efficacy of an immersive virtual reality (VR) experience into an online psychoeducational program impacts caregiver empathy and therefore emotional wellbeing. One-hundred informal caregivers of mild-to-moderate Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients will be enrolled and randomly assigned to (i) an online psychoeducational program (control arm); or (ii) an online psychoeducational program integrated with VR (experimental arm). VR will consist of 360-degree videos involving the caregivers to an immersive experience of dementia symptoms from the patient's perspective. Before, after the intervention and after 2 months, all participants will complete validated clinical scales for caregiver burden and anxiety (primary outcomes) and sense of competence and dispositional empathy (secondary outcomes). A subsample of 50 participants will also undergo MRI exam, including structural and functional (resting-state and task-functional MRI [fMRI]) sequences. The fMRI task paradigm will use emotional stimuli to evaluate the neural correlate of empathy, by stressing its cognitive and affective components. The main outcome will be the change in the clinical assessment; the secondary outcome will be the change in brain connectivity of networks subserving the empathic and emotional functioning. We expect that the psychoeducational program will decrease anxiety and stress, enabling caregivers to perceive themselves capable of managing AD patients at home, educating them on symptom handling and boosting their cognitive empathy. In the experimental intervention, the VR-based experience will act as an add-on to psychoeducation, leading to greater improvement in the assessed clinical dimensions. VR should, in fact, enable a deeper understanding of disease symptoms and improve caregivers' cognitive empathy. We expect that the experimental intervention will result in deeper comprehension of disease symptoms and further strengthen caregivers' cognitive empathy. At the neural level, we expect to observe increased activation in circuits subserving cognitive empathy and decreased activation in circuits underlying affective empathy. To the best of our knowledge, this will be the first randomized controlled trial assessing the effect of combining psychoeducational interventions with VR-based experience in caregivers, and assessing both clinical and imaging outcomes. Registered in ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT05780476).
Banques de données
ClinicalTrials.gov
['NCT05780476']
Types de publication
Journal Article
Randomized Controlled Trial
Clinical Trial Protocol
Langues
eng
Sous-ensembles de citation
IM
Pagination
e6145Subventions
Organisme : Ministero della Salute
Organisme : Alzheimer's Association
ID : AACSF-22-924470
Pays : United States
Informations de copyright
© 2024 The Author(s). International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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