Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
It’s long been said that music can help soothe the soul and ease a person’s pain, and new research from the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine has found there’s some truth to the old adage – at least, when it comes to pediatric surgery patients.
Dr. Santhanam Suresh, a professor of anesthesiology and pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, and his colleagues reported in the January 3 edition of the journal Pediatric Surgery International that children who were allowed to listen to music of their own choosing experienced a significant reduction in pain following major surgery.
The youngsters, all of whom were between the ages of nine and 14, selected from a playlist of top music, including Taylor Swift, Rihanna, and other artists in a number of different genres (including pop, rock, country and classical), as well as a short list of audiobooks. They then listened to the selected material for 30 minutes following their procedures.
According to Dr. Suresh and his fellow researchers, this is believed to be the first randomized study to evaluate and demonstrate the use of patient-preferred audio therapy as a potential way to control post-surgical pain in children. While previous research had analyzed the effectiveness of music for pain during short medical procedures, they did not use objective measures of pain, and did not show whether the music itself was responsible for altering pain perception.
“Audio therapy is an exciting opportunity and should be considered by hospitals as an important strategy to minimize pain in children undergoing major surgery,” Dr. Suresh, senior author on the study and the chair of pediatric anesthesiology at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, said in a statement. “This is inexpensive and doesn’t have any side effects.”
As the researchers explain, the search for a way to control post-surgical pain in children without the use of medication is important because the most commonly used type of treatment, opioid analgesics, can cause breathing problems in pediatric patients. For this reason, doctors often limit the amount of opiods prescribed, which means that their pain may not be well controlled.
Dr. Suresh believes the audio-therapy helped thwart a secondary pathway in the prefrontal cortex involved in the memory of pain. He explained that the idea is to help the patients to not focus on the pain by refocusing their mental channels onto something else, adding that it was important to let patients choose their own music or stories based on their individual preferences.
The treatment worked regardless of a patient’s initial pain score, Dr. Suresh said.
“It didn’t matter whether their pain score was lower or higher when they were first exposed to the audio therapy,” he explained. “It worked for everyone and can also be used in patients who have had ambulatory surgery and are less likely to receive opiods at home.”
“One of the most rewarding aspects of the study was the ability for patients to continue their own audio therapy,” added Sunitha Suresh, Dr. Suresh’s daughter and first author of the study. “After the study, several patients ended up bringing in their iPods and listening to their own music. They hadn’t thought of it before.”
Sunitha, who was abiomedical engineering student at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science with a minor in music cognition at the time of the study and is now a fourth-year medical student at Johns Hopkins Medical School, said that she was surprised that audiobooks also proved to be equally effective.
“Some parents commented that their young kids listening to audio books would calm down and fall asleep. It was a soothing and distracting voice,” she said. Sunitha designed the study with the assistance of Richard Ashley, an associate professor of music theory and cognition at the Bienen School of Music. The study was funded by a Northwestern undergraduate research grant.
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