SYSTEMATIC REVIEW article
Front. Med.
Sec. Family Medicine and Primary Care
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmed.2025.1572464
This article is part of the Research TopicDigital mindfulness in primary care: Enhancing health through technologyView all articles
Virtual reality for the management of musculoskeletal pain: an umbrella review
Provisionally accepted
- 1University Medical Center Astana, Nur-sultan, Kazakhstan
- 2School of Medicine, Nazarbayev University, Nur-sultan, Kazakhstan
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Musculoskeletal pain (MSK) is a condition that affects multiple parts of the musculoskeletal system, including limbs, neck, and back, leading to deterioration in both mental and physical health and overall quality of life. Despite the available treatments, they are not considered effective enough to eradicate pain symptoms, thereby requiring new methods as a substitute. This review comprehensively summarizes virtual reality (VR) technology as an adjunct or an alternative treatment for MSK pain and aims to explore the most suitable conditions and settings of VR. Pubmed, Scopus, and Cochrane databases were searched for recent systematic reviews and metaanalyses investigating VR and MSK pain. The search was performed according to PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) guidelines and revealed 17 relevant articles. The AMSTAR-2 (A MeaSurement Tool to Assess systematic Reviews) analysis was conducted to assess the quality of included studies. The Corrected Covered Area was calculated to identify the degree of overlap. The results found significant pain reduction and mental and physical improvements in patients with MSK pain in comparison to standard therapies in treating neck, knee, and back pain. Nevertheless, the heterogeneity and inconsistencies in results among papers were recognized. The promising aspects are multimodality, namely, VR in combination with exercises, patient acceptance of VR, and the effectiveness of immersive, non-immersive, and gamified versions. These findings also revealed the need for more research on underexplored regions, standardized methodologies, and personalized approaches. To summarize, VR poses the potential to treat MSK pain as an adjunct, and future research is recommended to focus on improving methodological rigor and multimodal approaches.
Keywords: virtual reality, Pain, Musculoskeletal Pain, Low Back Pain, Neck Pain
Received: 07 Mar 2025; Accepted: 25 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Kalikanov, Baizhanova, Tungushpayev and Viderman. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Dmitriy Viderman, School of Medicine, Nazarbayev University, Nur-sultan, Kazakhstan
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