‘AWESOME MIXES’ POINT TO ALZHEIMER’S TREATMENT

Some songs feel like they’ve been written just for you. They might send a shiver down your spine, give you goosebumps or even move you to tears. Songs like these seem to reach inside you and touch something that nothing else can. And for that very reason, they might be able to treat some of the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.

“People with dementia are confronted by a world that’s unfamiliar to them, which causes disorientation and anxiety,” said Jeff Anderson, who, along with his colleagues at the University of Utah Health, is investigating the potential for music-based treatments for Alzheimer’s. A recent study by the team suggests that songs a dementia sufferer finds emotionally resonant may alleviate their anxiety by increasing brain activity.

Songs that provoke an emotional response tap into the brain’s salience network. This is the part of the brain that chooses which stimuli are worthy of attention, and happens to be one of the few regions unaffected by Alzheimer’s. The study suggests that firing up the salience network with an ‘awesome mix’ of personally meaningful music seems to kick-start neighbouring regions of the brain that have been ravaged by the disease.

With the help of brain scans, the researchers found that patients listening to their personal soundtrack exhibited significantly higher functional connectivity in the visual, salience and executive networks, and the cerebellar and corticocerebellar network pair, compared to patients scanned in silence.

The authors point out that the small sample size of 17 patients and limited scope of the research mean the results are not conclusive.

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