Virtual rehabilitation of cognitive and balance performances of multiple sclerosis patients

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is one of the most common central nervous system disorders in adults and affects approximately 2.5 million people worldwide. In this study, we aimed to increase the patient's morale and decrease the cognitive impairment, increase the balance capacities, improve the quality of daily life and provide a contribution to MS patients who are in high place in the world and still have no definite treatment method because of the cause of MS disorder due to excessive cognitive impairment. In addition, most of the software used for this purpose is imported from abroad and this causes loss of foreign exchange. We believe that foreign exchange loss will decrease with the domestic game software sector shifting to this area. The patient group of our study was diagnosed as MS between September 2016 and October 2017 by the neurology outpatient clinics of the Kütahya Dumlupınar University Evliya Çelebi Training and Research Hospital and side branch policlinics. A total of 14 voluntary patients over 18-70 years of age were selected. Besides the routine treatment of the patients, brain trainers and games providing balance development were applied. The same game was played 3 times a week 45 minutes, suitable levels and appropriate games for twelve months. Games were played at the clinically stable phase of the patients. All neuropsychological tests of the patients were performed by a trained psychologist. Beck Depression Scale, Beck Anxiety Scale, Paced Auditory Serial Addition Test and Short Form-36 Quality of Life Scale were administered to each patient before and after treatment. According to test results; there was no statistically significant difference between pretreatment and posttreatment test results. However, individual differences were observed among the results of the same type of analysis of individuals. We can say that the reason for this is that patients have MS scores at different levels, leading to no pre-test and post-test differences. We think that it would be useful to extend the game variety and increase the number of patients. We also believe that improved games will contribute positively to the increase in quality of life in Alzheimer's patients.