Our First update of the year will be focused on some article concerning older adults with dementia. Two look at the impact of music therapy sessions on behaviors and the last will look at an evaluation of the Music in Dementia Assessment Scale.
Vink et al. (2014) published a quick overview of a RCT on persons with older adults with dementia and neuropsychiatric symptoms. Published as a letter to the editor, the authors outline a study that compared behaviors in persons receiving music therapy (n = 47) or recreational day activities (n = 47). Participants were administered the Neuropsychiatric Inventory Questionnaire (NPI-Q) before and every two weeks during a four month treatment period. Treatment consisted of 40 minute sessions 2xs a week. The researchers had 20% attrition or loss of data over the study. The researchers found that the NPI-Q scores for individuals in the MT group were significantly lower.
Although there are more participants included in this study, there is limited information about the intervention. The lack of information about the music therapy session makes it hard to make any judgements about the research.
These authors published a similar study in 2013 where they measured agitation using the Cohen-Mansfield Agitation Inventory (CMAI) in older adults with dementia that also had agitation. That study was completed on 77 older adults and demonstrated no significant difference between the music therapy group (n = 43) and the general activities group. Information from the participants section of the paper points to the same group of residents that is used for the above 2014 study (same death, attrition rates, and time period). This paper describes the music intervention as listening to folk music, singing, dancing, or playing a music instrument.
This study reports that a trained music therapist was employed for the intervention. One interesting discussion point was the feeling that the groups were too large (at 5 people) to provide necessary individualized care for the behaviors exhibited. I’m interested to know if these two publications are on the same individuals and if so, why separate the publications? More clarification would be helpful in this case.
Another article on the older adults population was published by McDermott (2014). The Music in Dementia Assessment Scales (MiDAS)is an observational scale to determine the impact of music therapy on adults with dementia. The MiDAS looks at “interest, response, initiation, involvement, and enjoyment.”
The researchers looked for inter-rater reliability using the tool and found high therapist reliability, but low staff reliability (meaning that a group of people didn’t score what they watched the same). However, test retest (looking at one person’s scores two different times) was high.
This tool may be a good one to use along other non-music therapy standardized tools in order to determine the impact of music therapy sessions on individuals with dementia.
References:
McDermott, O., Orgeta, V., Ridder, H.M., & Orrell, M.(2014). A preliminary psychometric evaluation of Music in Dementia Assessment Scales (MiDAS. Int Psychogeriatr, 13, 1-9. PMID: 24524811
Vink, A.C., Zuidersma, M., Boersma, F., de Jonge, P., Zuidema, S.U., & Slaets, J.P. (2014). Effect of Music Therapy Versus Recreational Activities on Neuropsychiatric Symptoms in Elderly Adults with DementiA: An Exploratory Randomized Controlled Trial. J Am Geriatr Soc., 62(2), 392-3. doi: 10.1111/jgs.12682. PMID: 24521374
Vink, A.C., Zuidersma, M., Boersma, F., de Jonge, P., Zuidema, S.U., & Slaets, J.P. (2013). The effect of music therapy compared with general recreational activities in reducing agitation in people with dementia: a randomised controlled trial. Int J Geriatr Psychiatry, 28(10), 1031-8. doi: 10.1002/gps.3924. PMID: 23280604