The Effect of Music Therapy in the Treatment of Alzheimer's Patients: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Study

Abstract

Solmaz Azimzadeh, Saber Azami and Gisoo Alizadeh

The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of music therapy in the treatment of Alzheimer's patients. The present study was conducted by reviewing available texts of e-books and databases including PubMed, Scopus, and web of science. The quality of reporting of all articles was evaluated by using the Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials checklist. CMA2 software was used to estimate the difference between the mean standard score of MMSE test for Alzheimer's patients before and after music therapy. Forest diagrams were used to calculate the standard mean difference between Standard Mean Difference and CI with 95% confidence. I2 was used to determine the amount of heterogeneity between studies (P-value <0.05 or I2> 50%) and funnel diagrams were used to assess the probability of diffusion bias. 692 articles were obtained. Finally, 7 articles entered the meta-analysis stage, which took into account several different conditions and groups in each article, 16 studies were included in the meta-analysis. Findings showed that music can significantly improve the performance of patients with Alzheimer's disease and performance improvement in them with moderate severity and also in studies with a period of 3 months or less and with non-daily exercise has been meaningful.

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