Thursday, July 24, 2003

CONTACT: Kim Carlyle, 706/583-0913, kosborne@uga.edu

UGA RESEARCHER DEVELOPS VIRTUAL REALITY ENVIRONMENT
TO HELP TREAT SMOKERS TRYING TO QUIT

LAWRENCEVILLE, Ga. – No longer relegated to science fiction, virtual reality (VR) has become part of the very real world of addiction treatment. Patrick Bordnick, assistant professor of social work at the University of Georgia, has developed a virtual reality environment to help treat people addicted to nicotine.

Funded by a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Bordnick has been working with Atlanta-based Virtually Better, a clinic specializing in providing virtual reality exposure therapy to people who suffer from specific phobias and anxiety disorders.

"We have found that role playing with a therapist is not an ecologically valid treatment environment," said Ken Graap, president of Virtually Better. "Up to 75 percent of smokers who are in therapy trying to quit will relapse. We found that it is not terribly effective for patients to role play when the person who was their therapist two minutes ago is now supposed to be a fellow smoker at a party offering them a cigarette." Exercises patterned like this have traditionally been used to teach coping and refusal skills to addicts.

Bordnick and Virtually Better believe they have developed a better solution in virtual reality. Their environments include a neutral room (with no stimuli), a room with inanimate smoking paraphernalia and a social situation – a virtual party – in which people are smoking. The subjects are exposed to these environments to determine whether the cues affect their desire to smoke. Desire is measured subjectively by asking respondents questions, and physiologically, by measuring heart rate and skin response.

"In the initial phase of research, we are seeking to determine if persons addicted to nicotine will respond to the stimuli we have created in the VR environment," said Bordnick. He explains the virtual situations have been filmed using real people, not computer simulations. Bordnick believes this enhancement will make his environments more realistic than many other VR situations. The ultimate goal in drug addiction is to offer a method for therapists and addiction researchers’ to bring real world experiences into clinical settings via VR.

Drug cravings are believed to be the most prominent and disturbing withdrawal symptom for recovering addicts. These environments are designed to help researchers who investigate addictions to better understand cravings and ways to minimize such responses. They have found cravings can be triggered years after abstinence from the drug by something as simple as a being placed in a particular environment or exposure to certain cues.

"It is interesting to see what smokers notice versus non-smokers," said Graap. "While we were developing the virtual environment, smokers who tried it out would say things like, ‘This wasn’t realistic because my cigarettes have a brown end on them and the ones I saw were all white.’ It tells us that smokers are really tuned in to very subtle cues, and it gave us good information about how carefully we needed to pay attention to the details."

The researchers are currently conducting trials to determine whether the environment they have created is powerful enough to create a reaction. They are in the process of recruiting subjects who will give feedback on whether they think the virtual environment is real enough to stimulate their cravings.

"Before we developed this virtual environment, there was no really good way to generalize research results," said Bordnick. "Different researchers would get different reactions and no one could be sure if it was due to variance in environment, demographics, treatment or what. We are hoping to develop an environment where we can standardize cue response, and from there we can do many different things."

The second phase will determine whether the situations they develop can be generalized. Then, in the third phase, they plan to assess the efficacy of substances and treatments that purport to reduce cravings for cigarettes. Participants in all phases of the trials receive counseling and follow-up treatment if they desire.

"Research has shown that real life cues lead to arousal and cravings," said Bordnick. "Although it is not feasible or ethical to take an addict to some real life environments like bars or parties, we can work with these patients in the safe, confidential environment of a therapist’s office to help them learn better coping and refusal skills and therefore, we expect, reduce their reliance on nicotine."

In addition to the smokers’ environments, Bordnick and Graap also have research currently funded to develop an environment for cocaine-addicted persons and they have a grant application pending to develop a virtual environment for alcohol-addicted persons.



NOTE TO EDITORS: Photos, screen shots and B-roll are available. Contact Rick O’Quinn, photo coordinator, at 706/542-8085 for more information.

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