MUSIC-BASED MEDICAL INTERVENTIONS WITH BORNA BONAKDARPOUR, MD

Music-based medical interventions can have remarkable therapeutic benefits for patients diagnosed with cognitive impairments such as Alzheimer’s disease, dementia and aphasia. Neurologist Borna Bonakdarpour, MD, explains how he is using and studying these clinical interventions through the new Northwestern Music and Medicine Program.

Episode Notes

Bonakdarpour’s interest in both music and neurology started at a young age. As a classically trained pianist, he studied music theory, harmony and history as a student and soon after medical school began to explore how music interventions could be used to help his patients with cognitive impairments. Through the new Northwestern Music and Medicine Program, Bonakdarpour and violist and music practitioner Clara Takarabe, are embarking on clinical music interventions, research and education on sound and music processing and how it can be used for brain health.

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Early on in his career Bonakdarpour worked with a patient with expressive aphasia who lost much of her ability to speak, but could sing old songs, nursery rhymes, poetry and prayers. This led him to study Melodic Intonation Therapy as an intervention with such patients.
Now he uses music interventions with patients with a variety of cognitive impairments.
In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, he started a music intervention pilot program with 87 general neurology patients at Northwestern Medicine who were in the hospital and not allowed to have visitors because of pandemic restrictions.
Nurses and social workers had patients fill out surveys to find out what sort of music they preferred and then violist Clara Takarabe, in consultation with a music therapist and a certified music practitioner, played private performances for each patient via FaceTime in a calm 30-40-min live music session.
Selecting music the subjects enjoy is important because Bonakdarpour says playing music they dislike can cause adverse reactions.
Ninety-eight percent of participants tended to highly agree that the intervention improved their emotional state. Results were published in Frontiers in Neurology.
During the intervention five of the patients were connected to electroencephalograms that measure brainwaves. Bonakdarpour said their brains calmed down during the music intervention and continued to be calm after music stopped. His team recently presented those findings to the Academy of Neurology. “This is very fascinating. You can actually measure brainwave changes that happened during music interventions,” he said.
He says there is a lot of room for more research using brain imaging to see if their hypothesis are correct. That work is starting now at Northwestern.
Bonakdarpour is encouraged that the NIH is supporting collaborating with other federal agencies to provide funding opportunities and programs that study the application of music in health settings through a program called Sound Health.