Music may aid stroke recovery

Hear­ing mu­sic in the early stages af­ter a stroke can im­prove pa­tients’ re­cov­ery, ac­cord­ing to pre­lim­i­nar­y re­search pub­lished on­line Feb. 20 in the med­i­cal jour­nal Brain.

Sci­en­tists said that if stroke pa­tients lis­tened to mu­sic for two hours a day, their ver­bal mem­o­ry and fo­cused at­ten­tion re­cov­ered bet­ter—the first time such an ef­fect has been shown in hu­mans.

Mu­sic may of­fer “a val­u­a­ble ad­di­tion to the pa­tients’ care, e­spe­cially if oth­er ac­tive forms of re­ha­bilita­t­ion are not yet fea­si­ble,” said Teppo Särkämö, the stu­dy’s lead au­thor.

Särkämö, a doc­tor­al stu­dent at the Uni­ver­s­ity of Hel­sin­ki and at the Hel­sin­ki Brain Re­search Cen­tre in Fin­land, fo­cused on pa­tients who had suf­fered a stroke of an ar­tery known as the mid­dle cer­e­bral, in the right or left side of the brain.

Särkämö and col­leagues said they started their study sub­jects on lis­tening reg­i­mens as soon as pos­si­ble af­ter their surg­eries. “The brain can un­dergo dra­mat­ic changes dur­ing the first weeks and months of re­cov­ery,” Särkämö said. “These changes can be en­hanced by stimula­t­ion from the en­vi­ron­ment.”

Most pa­tients had prob­lems with move­ment and think­ing pro­cesses such as at­ten­tion and mem­o­ry, he added.

The re­search­ers ran­domly as­signed pa­tients to hear mu­sic, au­di­o books or noth­ing, in ad­di­tion to stand­ard re­ha­bilita­t­ion. Pa­tients in the first two groups were al­lowed to pick their own mu­sic or au­di­o books. The re­search­ers fol­lowed and as­sessed the pa­tients for up to six months; 54 pa­tients com­plet­ed the stu­dy.

“Three months af­ter the stroke, ver­bal mem­o­ry im­proved from the first week post-stroke by 60 per­cent in mu­sic lis­teners, by 18 per­cent in au­di­o book lis­teners and by 29 per­cent in non-lis­teners,” Särkämö said. “Fo­cused at­ten­tion—the abil­ity to con­trol and per­form men­tal opera­t­ions and re­solve con­flicts among responses—im­proved by 17 per­cent in mu­sic lis­teners,” but not at all among the oth­ers as a whole. These dif­fer­ences were about the same anoth­er three months lat­er, Särkämö said; the mu­sic-lis­tening pa­tients were al­so less de­pressed and con­fused on av­er­age than non-lis­teners.

The re­search­ers sug­gested mu­sic might wield the ben­e­fi­cial ef­fects by stim­u­lat­ing a brain sys­tem im­pli­cat­ed in feel­ings of pleas­ure, re­ward, arous­al, mo­tiva­t­ion and mem­o­ry, known as the dopamin­er­gic meso­cor­ti­co­lim­bic sys­tem. Mu­sic might al­so stim­u­late the brain’s abil­ity to re­pair and re­new its wir­ing more gen­er­al­ly, they added.

The study is “promis­ing but will have to be rep­li­cat­ed and stud­ied fur­ther… to bet­ter un­der­stand the un­der­ly­ing neu­ral mech­a­nisms,” Särkämö said. One lim­ita­t­ion of the study, re­search­ers added, was that the ex­pe­ri­menters knew which pa­tients were in which group. Thus it was­n’t the pre­ferred sort of stu­dy, “double-blind,” in which evaula­t­ions take place with­out pa­tients or re­search­ers know­ing any of that.

Mu­sic may not work for eve­ry pa­tient, Särkämö cau­tioned, and it should be con­sid­ered as a sup­ple­ment rath­er than a re­place­ment for oth­er ther­a­pies. Re­cov­er­ing stroke pa­tients typ­ic­ally spend about three-fourths of their daily time out­side ther­a­py, ly­ing inac­tive, he said, so this may be a good time for mu­sic.

Source: http://www.world-science.net/othernews/080219_stroke-music
Forget yourself for others, and others will never forget you.