Music speeds up stroke recovery

Feb 20 2008

A new study has found that listening to music can accelerate recovery from a stroke.

Researchers say a daily dose of music, be it pop, classical or jazz, can speed recovery from debilitating strokes.

According to a study by researchers in Finland, stroke patients who listened to music for a couple of hours each day, saw a significant improvement in their verbal memory and attention span, and also experienced less depression.

This was in comparison to patients who received no musical stimulation, or who listened only to stories read aloud.

Lead author Teppo Sarkamo, a neuroscientist at Helsinki University, says they found 3 months after a stroke, verbal memory was boosted by 60 percent in music listeners, by 18 percent in audio book listeners, and by 29 percent in non-listeners.

Sarkamo says these differences remained six months after and their findings support a growing body of research pointing to the benefits of music and music therapy for conditions including autism, schizophrenia and dementia.

Sarkamo says this is the first time music alone has been shown to have a positive effect on victims of brain injury such as stroke.

For the study which took place between March 2004 and May 2006, 60 victims with an average age of just under 60, were randomly divided into the three groups; most had problems with movement, as well as cognitive processes such as memory and focusing their attention.

Every day one group listened to at least two hours of self-selected music, one group listened to audio books and a third to neither.

Fifty four patients completed the study during which they underwent a battery of cognitive and psychological tests.

Sarkamo speculates that mechanisms in the brain account for the startling impact of song and melody, an enhanced arousal of a part of the brain implicated in feelings of pleasure and reward that is stimulated by the release of dopamine, a hormone and neurotransmitter.

Other research has shown that increased dopamine enhances alertness, speed of information processing, attention, and memory in healthy humans.

Music also directly stimulates the damaged areas of the brain, as well as the more general mechanisms related to "brain plasticity," the ability of the brain to repair and renew its neural networks after damage.

Sarkamo says his findings need to be replicated by other larger-scale clinical trials before music is systematically integrated into the recovery regimen of stroke patients and listening to music may not work for all stroke victims.

The study does however appear to offer an easy and cost-effective therapy for recovering stroke patients, especially as stroke patients often spend about three-quarters of their time each day in non-therapeutic activities, mostly in their rooms, inactive and without interaction.

Sarkamo also says music could be particularly valuable for patients not yet ready for other forms of rehabilitation.

The study is published in the journal Brain.