Studying the effectiveness of neurologic music therapy in cognitive rehabilitation of stroke patients

Stroke can cause impairments in patients’ cognitive abilities. Using Neurologic Music Therapy in cognitive rehabilitation of these patients has been recommended. The Question is if this treatment can really help cognitive rehabilitation in stroke patients.

The purpose of this research was to study the effectiveness of Neurologic Music Therapy in cognitive rehabilitation of stroke patients.

In this quasi-experimental study with control group, using purposive sampling model, 30 stroke patients who had been referred to Firoozgar hospital were selected and then they were non-randomly assigned to 2 groups with 15 participants in each. The participants of experimental group participated in 14 Neurologic Music Therapy sessions. The handbook of Neurologic Music Therapy has been published in 2014 by Thaut and Hoemberg. The participants of control group only received the standard treatments. To measure the cognitive skills of the participants, Montreal Cognitive Assessment test was used which is developed by Nasreddine et al in 2005. Data were analyzed by mixed ANOVA.

The results showed that cognitive abilities in participants of experimental group had become significantly higher than participants of control group (p=0/001). 

It means that Neurologic Music Therapy can help improve cognitive abilities of stroke patients.