Anxiety orders are one of the most — if not the most — prevalent mental disorders in children and adolescents. For years, we have known that various forms of exposure therapy such as exposure-response prevention or the Worry Hill program can help youth learn to manage and reduce anxiety symptoms.

But would virtual reality exposure therapy (VRET) help? Given how interested kids and teens tend to be about VR, would they be motivated to try it and stick with it?

Kothgassner and Felnhofer reviewed available literature last year, but could only find four published trials representing a total sample of 100 participants between the ages of 8 and 16 years who had undergone VRET. Although clinical improvements were reported in anxiety symptoms, the lack of adequately controlled trials makes any such conclusions premature at best.

“Despite the evidence of VRET in adult samples, there is a need for more research with younger cohorts in order to be able to support this promising field of application,” the authors write. But to be blunt: how can we even call it promising when we have almost no data on it for this age group? The researchers sound a bit biased towards VRET, but we should probably remain neutral until there are some data from controlled studies that we can evaluate.

Reference:

Kothgassner OD, Felnhofer A. Lack of research on efficacy of virtual reality exposure therapy (VRET) for anxiety disorders in children and adolescents : A systematic review. Neuropsychiatr. 2021 Jun;35(2):68-75.

You can download the full text in .pdf format for free at  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8245387/pdf/40211_2020_Article_349.pdf