Music therapy may improve depression and anxiety in dementia patients, a new analysis suggests.
Music therapy might also improve emotional well-being among those with dementia, researchers found. But they didn’t find any benefits when it came to cognition and behavioral issues such as agitation or aggression, according to the report in the Cochrane Library journal.
Study leader Jenny van der Steen, a researcher with the department of public health and primary care at Leiden University Medical Center, said that although the benefits of music therapy weren’t large, “small effects are valuable, too, because even a small improvement or maintaining a certain level while otherwise a decline is expected is very important for people with dementia and those caring for them.”
“These outcomes are closely linked to quality of life and may be more relevant than improving or delaying decline in cognition for the patients under study, mostly nursing home patients,” van der Steen told Reuters in an email.
For the analysis, the research team pooled data from 21 smaller randomized trials involving a total of 1097 patients. Patients in the trials received either music based therapies that involved at least five sessions, or usual care or some other activity with or without music.
Participants in the studies had dementia of varying degrees of severity and the majority were residents in institutions. Seven of the studies provided individual music therapy, while the others delivered the intervention in a group setting.
The new findings could have a significant impact on dementia patients, said Dr. Alexander Pantelyat, an assistant professor of neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Music and Medicine.
Pantelyat said it’s not surprising that music therapy could help those with dementia. “It’s known that areas that process music in the brain overlap with the emotional areas and those that process language. If a song from somebody’s youth is played it’s possible it will bring back memories associated with the first time they heard it. And that speaks to the need for a tailored approach. Not a ‘one song fits all’ approach,” he explained.
