QOLP-28. THE USE OF VIRTUAL REALITY FOR SYMPTOM MANAGEMENT: APPLICATION IN NEURO-ONCOLOGY

Abstract Patients with primary central nervous system (CNS) tumors are highly symptomatic due to the functional sequelae of their disease and an unfavorable prognosis. Virtual reality (VR) immersive technology has demonstrated benefit in improving patients’ symptom burden, such as distress, pain, anxiety, and fatigue. However, this has not been explored in a CNS tumor population. This project explored the potential use of VR for symptom management in CNS tumor patients. A descriptive analysis of MDASI-BT/MDASI-SP/PROMIS-Anxiety patient-reported outcomes (PROs) for 535 CNS tumor patients was performed to identify the common moderate-severe (> 4 on a 0–10 scale) symptoms. Additionally, a systematic review of literature was performed addressing the question “For adult patients with solid tumors, what effect does VR have on their self-reported symptoms, such as distress, anxiety and pain?” The systematic literature review resulted in 17 studies using VR in other solid tumor populations, which demonstrated improvement in pain, anxiety, and distress. However, study designs often lacked rigor and none incorporated any biomarkers to correlate with PROs. CNS tumor symptom review of our patient cohort revealed that the majority of the patients were Caucasian (83%) males (58%) with a median age of 50 years (range, 18–83). At the time of diagnosis, 35% had a gross total resection. Glioblastoma was the most common diagnosis (32%) and 50% had a high-grade glioma. The most prevalent moderate-severe symptoms in this sample was fatigue (34%), with (14%) anxiety, (18%) pain, and (19%) distress. Given the high symptom rate in our patients, the promising but limited data that VR technology could improve distress and other symptoms provides strong support for this intervention in the CNS tumor population. Further research is needed to assess feasibility and efficacy of VR, as well as incorporation of correlative biomarkers, to better determine potential improvement in patient symptom burden.