Effective Music Therapy for Dementia Patients?

Roseous.com - Effective Music Therapy for Dementia Patients? Music, apart from being an entertainment, is said to contribute to health. A recent study this year shows that music therapy can reduce the level of depression and anxiety in dementia patients. However, how effective are the results obtained?

Described by Dr. Suci Dwi Putri, the term dementia is used to describe a syndrome or collection of symptoms due to brain diseases that interfere with memory, thinking, orientation, and other abilities.

Effective Music Therapy for Dementia Patients?

"Non-foggy awareness, and usually accompanied by low cognitive function. There are times when the decline in emotional control, social behavior or motivation begins, "said Dr. Suci explains the other characteristics of dementia.

Under these circumstances, a group of researchers from Leiden University Medical has conducted a study regarding the benefits of music therapy in dementia patients. How is the result?

Effectiveness of music therapy for dementia

The head of the study, Jenny van der Steen, revealed that the aim of the study was to explore how effective music therapy can improve emotional health and quality of life for people with dementia.

Steen and his colleagues performed music therapy on 1,097 patients with dementia with varying severity. Therapy was carried out at least five times during the study.

The results showed that music therapy was enough to help reduce symptoms of depression and overall behavioral problems, even though the percentage was not large. This therapy also has very little influence on cognitive problems.

Knowing these results, the research team then tried to do the same for people who did not have dementia. As a result, music is the same as cocaine which is able to activate the nucleus accumbens in parts of the brain and produce feelings of pleasure.

According to one researcher, Alexander Pantelyat, the part of the brain that processes music is related to emotional and language areas.

"If a song from the past is played, it should bring back memories related to the song. This means that music therapy must be individual and cannot be equated for each patient, "he said.

Although the benefits of music therapy are not great, the slightest reduction in syndrome in dementia patients will be very valuable. At least, with the presence of music therapy, dementia patients have other alternatives for chemical drugs which usually have certain side effects.

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Other treatments for dementia

Dementia is a disorder of overall cognitive function in the brain. This situation is characterized by a disturbance in memory function or memory. Initially, short-term memory is disrupted, and will be followed by the medium and long term.

"In order to deal with this so as not to be more progressive, one can continue to be stimulated to have various brain activities, such as reading, telling stories, sewing, knitting, and others," said Dr. Nitish Basant Adnani.

The effectiveness of music therapy to help manage symptoms of dementia is not too significant. However, this therapy can still provide a little help as long as it is done properly and correctly. However, people with this disease are still encouraged to consult regularly with doctors, so that health conditions can be monitored continuously.js