Making Music To Deal With Dementia

Main Category: Alzheimer's / Dementia
Article Date: 23 Sep 2008 - 2:00 PDT

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Dementia often robs spouses of quality time together but an innovative University of Queensland project hopes to find ways to reclaim it.

Dr Felicity Baker, from UQ's School of Music, is investigating how music therapy might improve partner satisfaction by providing opportunities for the sharing of memories associated with certain songs.

"One of the biggest problems of couples living together where one person has dementia is that there's a breakdown in the relationship as one partner begins to lose their ability to communicate and interact with their spouse," Dr Baker said.

"The project will involve having a music therapist go into the home and show the spouse how they can use music as a way of creating meaningful experiences with their partner.

"This includes using music like old songs and dancing to facilitate conversation, a way of interacting together."

Dr Baker said the music therapy intervention could potentially be developed into a DVD which would be used to instruct partners of people suffering from dementia in their own home.

"People with dementia have difficulty with short term memory and lose the ability to communicate verbally. However, research shows that they really respond to music because it taps into automatic memory," Dr Baker said.

"When they listen to a piece of music that they have used in their past, it can stimulate the recall of those memories, which then helps them to talk about those memories which then helps with interaction.

"What's important is that we show the spouse how to do that - so not just how to turn on a CD, but to think about what music to choose, and how to interpret their partner's responses and respond accordingly, and what kind of questions and conversational starting points they can give to create interaction."

Another important aspect of the study will be to investigate the success of music therapy techniques between participants from different ethnic backgrounds.

Dr Baker is the co-creator of the successful Sing, soothe, sleep program for mothers and their babies, and said this new project was the first large-scale dementia study of its kind.

Partners involved will be evaluated on their levels of depression, anxiety and burden, and their perspective on how their relationship has changed since the onset of dementia.

"There's been lots of lots of studies that have looked at how partners or spouses can cope with the burden of care giving, but there has been limited research on how people can help them maintain a satisfying relationship," she said.

The research will be carried out in collaboration with Associate Professor Nancy Pachana from the School of Psychology, and Associate Professor Denise Grocke from The University of Melbourne, with the data collection process taking about two years.

The University of Queensland, Brisbane Australia