Effects of music and music therapy on mood in neurological patients

Abstract

Mood disorder and depressive syndromes represent a common comorbid condition in neurological disorders with a prevalence rate that ranges between 20% and 50% of patients with stroke, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, and Parkinson's disease. Notwithstanding, these conditions are often under-diagnosed and under-treated in the clinical practice and negatively affect the functional recovery, the adherence to treatment, the quality of life, and even the mortality risk. In addition, a bidirectional association between depression and neurological disorders may be possible being that depressive syndromes may be considered as a risk factor for certain neurological diseases. Despite the large amount of evidence regarding the effects of music therapy (MT) and other musical interventions on different aspects of neurological disorders, no updated article reviewing outcomes such as mood, emotions, depression, activity of daily living and so on is actually available; for this reason, little is known about the effectiveness of music and MT on these important outcomes in neurological patients. The aim of this article is to provide a narrative review of the current literature on musical interventions and their effects on mood and depression in patients with neurological disorders. Searching on PubMed and PsycInfo databases, 25 studies corresponding to the inclusion criteria have been selected; 11 of them assess the effects of music or MT in Dementia, 9 explore the efficacy on patients with Stroke, and 5 regard other neurological diseases like Multiple Sclerosis, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis/motor neuron disease, Chronic quadriplegia, Parkinson's Disease, and Acquired Brain dysfunctions. Selected studies are based on relational and rehabilitative music therapy approaches or concern music listening interventions. Most of the studies support the efficacy of MT and other musical interventions on mood, depressive syndromes, and quality of life on neurological patients.

Mozart's music in children with drug-refractory epileptic encephalopathies

“…Improved attention and participation to the environmental stimuli in some children, not reported so far, to our knowledge, might be correlated with the beneficial effect of music therapy on mood [13] as well as on cognition [14] and with the well-known effect of activation of parasympathetic tone [15].…”

Music for reducing the anxiety and pain of patients undergoing a biopsy: A meta‐analysis

“…Clinical studies have also indicated an important result; that is, music could influence human emotions and treatment outcome in a positive way (Carlson et al, 2015;Iyendo, 2016). With the long history of its medical use, music therapy has been wildly applied to various physical, psychological, functional and educational settings to help improve the physiological and psychological status of patients (Bradt, Dileo, Magill, & Teague, 2016;Raglio et al, 2015;Silverman, 2014).…”

The therapeutic effect of relative satisfaction on pain treatment: focus on gobchuchum (a hunchback dance) of Ok-jin Gong

“…Music decreases the anxiety and pain scores of patients during SWL and is associated with higher satisfaction scores for remedies (Akbas et al, 2016). Music engages a variety of brain areas involved in emotion, motivation, cognition, and motor skills, and musical input have been utilized to enhance socialization and cognitive, sentimental, and neuromotor operation (Raglio et al, 2015). Applied music, through its main elements -pitch, dynamics and harmony, meter, tempo and rhythm, allows the organization of movement in time and space, leads to movement fluency, provides impulses to muscles and supplies rhythmic instructions by which to initiate and maintain activity (Bukowska et al, 2016).…”