New experimental virtual reality (VR) applications are starting to be developed within rehabilitation settings to help people treat pain and anxiety.

• Researchers from Ohio University developed a virtual dodgeball intervention designed to elicit graded increases in lumbar spine flexion while reducing expectations of fear and harm.
• The University of Washington Medicine Regional Burn Center at Harborview in Seattle has used VR therapy for distracting burn patients from excessive pain during wound care.
• Bloomberg recently published coverage on the effects that virtual reality has on Alzheimer’s and chronic pain.

There’s a lot more research needed before VR is going to be widely accepted as a pain relief method. Brennan Spiegel, a gastroenterologist at Cedars-Sinai who’s also director of health services research at the Los Angeles hospital, is about to begin a study on many more patients.

Researchers can detect how chemical messengers called neurotransmitters are distributed around the brain in real time, thanks to new cell-based detectors called CNiFERs. This newfound ability was developed as part of the White House BRAIN Initiative and could further our understanding of how brain function arises from the complex interplay of individual neurons, including how complex behaviors like addiction develop. Neuroscientist Paul Slesinger of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, one of the senior researchers who spearheaded this research, presented the sensors at the American Chemical Society’s 252nd National Meeting & Exposition. Watch the press conference which was streamed live on August 22, 2016 above.

The emerging field of bioelectronic medicine aims to target disorders traditionally treated with drugs and instead uses advanced neuromodulation devices that may offer significant advantages. In a recent breakthrough first-in-human study, scientists used a small implantable bioelectronic device that significantly improved measures of disease activity in patients with rheumatoid arthritis. The clinical trial data will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).