Music therapy can reduce anxiety in cancer patients, and it may also have positive effects on mood, pain, and quality of life according to a new Cochrane systematic review led by Dr Joke Bradt, an associate professor at the College of Nursing and Health Professions at Drexel University.
Music therapy treatments involve a range of experiences from music therapists engaging patients in music to improve psychological and physical well-being to patients simply listening to prerecorded music. For this review, researchers focused on trials involving patients with any type of cancer who were also offered music or music therapy sessions.
Researchers examined data from 1891 patients taking part in 30 trials. Trained music therapists were used in 13 trials. In the remaining 17 trials, patients listened to prerecorded music. There was great variation in how long and how often patients participated in music sessions. Nonetheless, according to clinical anxiety score data, patient anxiety was considerably reduced by music compared to standard treatments. The results also suggested that music therapy may increase patients’ quality of life. For instance, researchers found music benefited mood and pain but not depression. Smaller beneficial effects were also discovered for heart rate, respiratory rate, and blood pressure.
“The evidence suggests that music interventions may be useful as a complementary treatment to people with cancer,” said Dr Bradt, a board-certified music therapist with expertise in medical music therapy. “Music interventions provided by trained music therapists as well as listening to prerecorded music both have shown positive outcomes in this review, but at this time there is not enough evidence to determine if one intervention is more effective than the other.”
Dr Bradt added, “It should be noted, however, that when patients can’t be blinded to an intervention, there is an opportunity for bias when they are asked to report on subjective measures like anxiety, pain, mood and quality of life.”
The researchers point out that the quality of evidence for some outcomes was low because of the small number of trials that have been carried out. Further trials could help increase certainty in the findings and improve understanding of music’s impact on distress, body image, and other aspects for which research is currently too scarce to draw any conclusions.
Dr Bradt was the lead author of 4 previous Cochrane reviews on music interventions with medical patients. She is an associate professor in the Department of Creative Arts Therapies at Drexel.
Source: Bradt J, Dileo C, Grocke D, Magill L. Music interventions for improving psychological and physical outcomes in cancer patients. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2011, Issue 8. Art. No.: CD006911. DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD006911.pub2.
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