Benefits of Cultural Activities on People With Cognitive Impairment: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Museums and cultural institutions are increasingly striving to respond to the interests and needs of the society that hosts them. This means, apart from other actions, that these institutions must be involved in the health and wellbeing of society, and the creation of cultural activities aimed at people with cognitive impairment, a group of individuals that is growing worldwide due to the aging of society and the increasing prevalence of dementia. The involved sectors are aware of the potential and benefits of activities for this population, even though there is much research to be conducted. To date, no systematic review has focused on the benefits of cultural activities for cognitively impaired people. This study aimed to explore the benefits of different modalities of cultural activities with evidence from 145 studies from various databases, which met the inclusion criteria. Significant improvements in general cognition, quality of life (QoL), emotional wellbeing, socialization, and communication were generally reported after interventions, with a reduction in depression symptoms. There was not enough evidence to prove memory, language, or daily functioning improvements attributable to cultural interventions. There were no significant reductions reported in apathy, sadness, agitation, or anxiety.

Benefits of Cultural Activities on People with Cognitive Impairment: A Meta-Analysis

“…The statistically significant result obtained for dementia when conducting a partial MA’ considering the CI typologies demonstrated that cultural interventions can be beneficial in some cases. The obtained results can be related to what the precedent SR concluded [ 22 ]. This means that this type of intervention can be beneficial for people living with CI, making their lives more comfortable during the process.…”

“…The approach this type of intervention can provide to CI patients may be the reason for the statistically significant result, since again, the benefits this type of intervention can provide to the participants are directly related to those outputs related to their emotional wellness more than their clinical well-being [60][61][62]. Again, there is an interrelationship between these meta-analysis results and the ones obtained during the previous SR [22], with the most reported outcomes for performing arts interventions being the ones related to socialization and communication as well as the ones related to emotional well-being. These results reinforce the evidence that cultural interventions have the potential to have a positive impact on non-clinical aspects of CI [58,[63][64][65].…”

“…Nevertheless, the high grade of heterogeneity identified and the results obtained in a previously published SR [ 22 ] called for a segmentation of the analyzed data. It is important to mention that in the prior SR, some benefits for participants with CI taking part in cultural interventions were detected.…”

“…However, it will not cure them, make their impairment remit, or stop them from proceeding, as the effect size, despite being statistically significant, is very low. The findings encourage using this type of intervention, but one must be cautious and wary, especially with any expected level of effectiveness and the type of benefits obtained [ 11 , 22 , 58 ].…”

“…This investigation, therefore, sets out to prove the effectiveness of cultural practices on health and well-being. It is a follow-on to a previous SR [ 22 ] centered on cultural practice directed at people living with CI, and it hopes to counterbalance the current lack of meta-analysis (MA) focused on this topic. The main aim of this research was to locate and analyze studies based on cultural activities to evaluate, identify, and describe their benefits for cognitively impaired people who participated independently of the cause of their condition.…”