Objective: The aim of this study was verify the role of music therapy (MT) in motor and emotional improvement in Parkinson’s disease patients.

Background: Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder with motor and non-motor symptoms. The motor symptoms are secondary to the loss of dopamine. Also accompanied by various non-motor symptoms, including pain, anxiety depression, dementia and others. These symptoms have dramatic impact on the quality of life or the patients. The Music Therapy have been developed in order to improve the clinical manifestations of this disease with scientific evidence for the therapeutic effects in PD.

Method: This is a prospective study that included subjects with PD, pharmacological treatment only, with no changes of medication and preserved cognitive functions during the study. The clinical evaluation was by a neurologist using the Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS) pre-MT, during the 24th session of MT and three months after the end of the MT series. Trained music therapists, twice a week, for 40 minutes each conducted the MT sessions. The clinical evaluation included perception of music by the patient, subjective impression of the last session, and independent evaluation of the therapist through videos of the sessions coded so that the music therapist that evaluated them could not identify their order.

Results: The data show improvement according to UPDRS evaluation of neck rigidity (51.92%), hand movements on the right and left sides (81.05%), fast and alternate hand movements on the right and left sides (59.29%), rigidity in the upper extremity on the left side (64.00%), leg agility on the right side (66.66%), gait (54.54%), postural stability (81.81%) and bradykinesia/hypokinesia (45.45%)

Conclusion: Music therapy has shown good results as an approach to treatment of motor and non-motor symptoms of patients with Parkinson’s disease, and this has been increasingly established through scientific evidence. These results demonstrate that the licensed music therapist can be inserted, more frequently, into multidisciplinary treatment teams for PD.

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/musicoterapy-and-neurorehabilitation-in-patients-with-parkinsons-disease/