Emotional problems, such as stress, anxiety, or depression, can make a person more forgetful and can be mistaken for dementia.

Emotional problems, such as stress, anxiety, or depression, can make a person more forgetful and can be mistaken for dementia.

INTRODUCTION

Hello, everyone! Thank you for coming! My name is Nikhola and today I’m going to talk about Music therapy, so the title of my presentation ‘Can Music therapy help Alzheimer’s disease?’ This presentation is aimed to investigate the effects of music therapy on people with Alzheimer’s disease and give evidence that this method may help them.

I’d like to start my presentation by introducing the outline. Firstly I will give information about Alzheimer disease. Then I will move on to an argument, which demonstrates that Music therapy, can help those patients. After I will mention the arguments against Music effect. And Finally, I will reach conclusion.

What is Alzheimer’s disease? Alzheimer’s disease is an irreversible, progressive brain disease that slowly destroys memory and thinking skills and, eventually even the ability to carry out the simplest tasks of daily living. In most people with Alzheimer’s, symptoms first appear after age 65.

In Alzheimer's disease, the hippocampus is one of the first regions of the brain to suffer damage. The hippocampus is an area of the brain that plays an important role in consolidating information from short-term memory into long-term memory. It is part of the system associated with emotions and long-term memories. Also it regulates certain hormones.

It is presumed that listening to music integrates the function of both the auditory and memory/learning related these structures in the brain. This may shed some light on the recent experimental observations obtained regarding the effects of music therapy.

MAIN BODY

1) Let’s turn now to the arguments for Music therapy. There are several positive effects of music therapy on people with Alzheimer’s, such as improvement of social, emotional skills, an increase hormone level and caloric consumption.

Music therapy may help to improve social and emotional side.

Saliva samples were taken from patients before and after the first and twenty-fifth session and again 1 month later to assess chromograninA (CgA) – a psychological stress indicator present in saliva – and immuniglobulin A (IgA) – an indicator of immunological status also present in saliva.

The researchers found that music therapy reduces agitated behaviours, including anxiety, irritability, and restlessness; and also reduce stress. In order to state this, they conduct quantitative analysis of saliva. Thus saliva samples were taken from patients before and after the first and twenty-fifth session to assess chromogranin A, which is a psychological stress indicator in the saliva. Levels of CgA were decreased, indicating reduced levels of stress in the music therapy group.

Another group of researchers suggested that music produced a reduction in aggression and an increase in sensory awareness, including smiling and eye contact. The researchers recognized the limitations of their study as being the small sample size.

Furthermore music could reduce negative behaviours and enhanced positive social interaction. The researchers concluded that music therapy acted as a powerful stimulus that induced a variety of positive effects on behaviour, and improved the wellbeing of participants. The key is to find ways to connect and understand people with Alzheimer’s who appear incoherent and unable to communicate.

2) Also music therapy may increase hormone level. It is positive effect, because In both sexes, sex hormone levels decrease with aging. These reductions have been correlated to various symptoms in the elderly including diminished cognitive function, disturbance of memory, mind and mood, depression, and climacteric disturbance. In Alzheimer’s disease, the aging-related reductions in hormones, especially sex hormone, represent a critical risk factor. This is because such sex hormone as estrogen protects the nerves and acts to control cell proliferation. Moreover, estrogen decreases the β amyloid peptide content in the neurons which is a typical pathologic finding in Alzheimer’s disease. These achieved results demonstrate that the “music therapy” condition increased the testosterone level significantly after stimuli. It is considered that music therapy restores normal hormone levels and suppresses nerve cell damage and protects nerve cells, thus terminating the progression of Alzheimer’s disease.

3) Another argument for Music therapy is that it may increase caloric consumption.

People with Alzheimer tend to loss weight. Weight loss in AD has been associated with greater disease severity, faster decline, and increased mortality.

Music’s potential benefit might include ability to mitigate more stressful sounds in the environment thus leading to reduced irritability, improved mood, therefore increased time spent at the table, the participants also ate at a slower pace. D.

Perhaps less encouraging was the increased con- sumption of carbohydrates during the music period.

Nevertheless Increased caloric consumption should be viewed as a positive outcome among a population at risk for being underweight, yet advocating the con- sumption of “empty” calories could be problematic especially given the importance of making every calorie—of the few consumed—count.

4) In comparison to positive effect of music therapy, arguments against do not have strong evidence. Here 2 possible negatuve side of music therapy is mentioned, first is short-term effectiveness. Thus effects of music therapy did not last 1 month. However it is not crucial, because delay of any type of other treatment for numerous diseases will lead to disappearanc of previous effect and even deterioration of disease. Secondly music may cause negative emotions. Some songs are related to particular past event, which could bb negative. Thus it may provoke stress.

Дата добавления: 2015-09-29