Music therapy for patients with cardiovascular diseases - A systematic review

Background and objective. It has been suggested that patients recovering from acute myocardial infarction and acute cardiac disease may benefit from music therapy. This review is aimed to assess whether adjunctive music therapy is effective in patients suffering from various cardiac conditions. Methods. Electronic literature searches were performed using Medline, the Cochrane Library, Embase, CISCOM, CINAHL, AMED, the British Nursing Index and Psychinfo. References of identified articles were checked for further potential trials. Randomised clinical trials of adjunctive music therapy that involved patients with cardiac conditions were considered. Music therapy was defined as passively listening to music in addition to standard care. Data on study design, experimental intervention, control intervention, primary outcome parameters, statistics and results were extracted in a standardised manner. To be included, studies had to quantify endpoints relevant for cardiac conditions. Results: Twelve randomised clinical trials were included in the systematic review. Eight of these showed significant benefits in a range of endpoints of music therapy over no such treatment. Music therapy was seen as superior to no treatment in three studies measuring physiological outcomes. In six trials, music therapy was superior to the control condition for psychological outcome measures. In three of the included studies music therapy was not superior to the control condition in any of the outcome measures. Conclusion: Collectively, these data suggest that music therapy shows some promise to lower patient anxiety, heart rate and possibly blood pressure of patients with cardiac conditions. The use of music therapy for cardiac patients warrants further rigorous investigation.