SOUND CHECK

Catchy songs really get stuck in your head — some, deeply enough to evade Alzheimer’s disease.

New research from the University of Utah Health shows that playing a familiar piece of music or beloved song can actually help ground dementia patients in reality and stimulate their minds.

That’s because the part of the brain associated with our emotional response to music — known as the salience network — is a memory bank that even Alzheimer’s can’t corrupt.

“People with dementia are confronted by a world that is unfamiliar to them, which causes disorientation and anxiety,” radiology professor and study co-author Jeff Anderson writes in a press release about the study, which will be published in the Journal of Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease. “We believe music will tap into [a part] of the brain that is still relatively functioning.”

Researchers created personalized playlists of meaningful songs for patients and scanned the patients’ brains to see what regions lit up when they listened to the music. They also scanned the patients’ brains as they sat in silence, and compared the two images.

They found that music activated the patients’ minds and caused different parts of their brains to communicate with one another.

While the results aren’t conclusive — the small sample was only 17 patients — researchers hope to conduct more testing and to develop music-based treatments to help patients with dementia.

“No one says playing music will be a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, but it might make the symptoms more manageable, decrease the cost of care and improve a patient’s quality of life,” Anderson writes.