Many of us have probably seen news headlines in the past week announcing that “music therapy may ease anxiety” or “music may help” patient with cancer. These headlines are referring to the newly published Cochrane Review that looked at music therapy for outcomes in patients with cancer.

Completed by Bradt et al. (2011), this review included randomized controlled trials and quasi-randomized trials using music for persons with cancer. The researchers found 30 trials with a total of 1891 participants. Studies were either classified as music therapy studies (n = 13) or medical music (pre-recorded music listening) studies (n = 17).

The results indicated that music interventions may be beneficial for anxiety, pain, mood, or quality of life. Furthermore, there may be positive effects on respiration, heart rate, and blood pressure. The authors state that more RCTs are needed to determine the difference between music medicine and music therapy and that many of the included studies had a high risk for research bias.

What does this mean for clinicians? Many music therapy clinicians work in oncology and see the positive effect of music in the clinic. This evidence provides some nice support for music therapy with this population; however, it also points out that there is a need for more research.

If you are a clinician that works with this population, you may be interested in the full article. One nice thing about well-executed reviews is that the authors do all the “leg work” of finding, analyzing, and synthesizing the research into one (97 page) report.

Refrence:
Bradt, J., Dileo, C., Grocke, D., & Magill, L. (2011). Music interventions for improving psychological and physical outcomes in cancer patients. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 10(8). PMID: 21833957