Want your medicines to be more effective? Research shows that just turning on your favorite song while you pop the pills can help. While previous studies used music-listening interventions as a tool to treat pain and anxiety, a team from Michigan State University in the US examined the effects of music-listening interventions on chemotherapy-induced nausea. Studying adopted a new approach. “Music listening interventions are like over-the-counter drugs,” said Jason Kiernan, assistant professor in the College of Nursing. “You don’t need a doctor to prescribe them.”
“Pain and anxiety are both neurological phenomena and are interpreted as a state in the brain. Chemotherapy-induced nausea is not a stomach condition, it is a neurological one,” Kiernan said.
The small pilot study, published in the Journal of Clinical Nursing Research, involved 12 patients undergoing chemotherapy treatment who agreed to listen to their favorite music for 30 minutes each time they needed to take their needed anti-nausea medication. was needed.
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They repeated the music intervention if they had nausea at any point in the five days beyond their chemotherapy treatment. Patients in the study provided a total of 64 events. “When we listen to music, our brains activate all kinds of neurons,” Kiernan said.
While Kiernan saw a reduction in the severity of patients’ nausea and their ratings of distress (how much it bothered them), he cautioned that it was difficult to separate whether it was the slow release of the drug doing its job or The benefits of music increased.
He wants to further research this, building on a previously published study that found an increase in the amount of serotonin, a neurotransmitter released by platelets, in the blood after listening to unpleasant and pleasant music.
“Serotonin is the major neurotransmitter that causes chemotherapy-induced nausea. Cancer patients take drugs to block the effects of serotonin,” Kiernan said.
The researchers found that patients listening to pleasant music experienced the lowest levels of serotonin release, indicating that serotonin remained in blood platelets and was not released to circulate throughout the body. The results also showed that after listening to music they found unpleasant, patients experienced more stress and increased levels of serotonin release.
“This was interesting because it provides a neurochemical explanation and a possible way to measure serotonin and blood platelet release of serotonin in my study,” Kiernan said.
“In 10 to 20 years, wouldn’t it be neat if you could use a nonreligious intervention like listening to 10 minutes of your favorite music to supplement a medication?”