An audience of patients with Alzheimer’s disease listens in rapt attention as a young woman sings the French song Beau Soir. Despite his failing mind, one of the men in the crowd, Les Dean, translates the words into English for a friend.
“See how the setting sun paints a river with roses,” he whispers. “Tremulous vision floats over fields of grain.”
When the audience joins in for the sing-along on another tune, Dean’s voice rumbles in a resonant baritone, “Take my hand, I’m a stranger in paradise. All lost in a wonderland, a stranger in paradise.”
Dean, 76, once taught music at Chicago’s Senn High School, invented and sold his own music education system and sang with the Chicago Symphony Chorus. Now, like many patients with Alzheimer’s, he is to some extent lost in the past, a stranger to the present. He asks a visitor, “How are the children?” Five minutes later, he asks again, and again, unable to recall the question or the answer. But when the music plays, he smiles, and is transported to a place of beauty, where everything still makes sense.
In recent years, music therapy has grown in popularity for its seeming ability to help calm people with dementia and reconnect them with their memories. Now a Northwestern University researcher is testing whether music played for residents of a sub-urban nursing home can be therapeutic, whether it can improve cognition, conversation and relationships.
As the number of dementia patients grow to nearly one in three seniors by the time of death, advocates hope to get insurance and Medicare to extend music therapy to everyone who could benefit from it.
In the process, caregivers whose parents or partners have grown distant, confused and agitated are finding new ways to share meaningful moments with the ones they love.
A person with dementia can recede so far that he or she is no longer responsive, suggesting personality and consciousness have been lost. But in his book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, the renowned late neurologist Dr Oliver Sacks wrote that he’d seen such patients shiver or weep while listening to music.
“Once one has seen such responses,” he wrote, “one knows that there is still a self to be called upon, even if music, and only music, can do the calling.”
Research has suggested benefits from music therapy for people with autism, depression, schizophrenia, brain injuries and cancer. New-borns in intensive care have been found to gain weight faster when exposed to music.
For people recovering from a stroke, the rhythm of music can help them regain their gait. Those with aphasia, who’ve lost the ability to speak, sometimes can sing familiar songs, and some can eventually be taught to transition from singing to talking.
Such therapy, known as melodic intonation treatment, was used to help Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords recover her speech after she was shot in the head.
Researchers suspect this may be particularly useful for patients with damage to the left side of the brain, because music emphasises use of the right side of the brain, providing a potential alternate route to develop new nerve pathways.
For some people with dementia, music therapy has been shown to enhance attention and cognition, to improve behaviour while reducing the use of psychoactive drugs, and to reduce anxiety and depression. Singing songs can help prompt specific memories that otherwise might have been forgotten completely, experts say.
Some patients get very agitated by being disoriented, and might throw things or lash out at others. But when they hear music from their youth, it can put them in a familiar environment and help them feel more at ease. Intrigued by the potential benefits, Dr Borna Bonakdarpour, a neurologist with Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, put together a music therapy study at Silverado Orchard Park Memory Care Community in Morton Grove.
“Music therapy is gaining more confidence now as an intervention, so this is a very exciting time,” Bonakdarpour said. “We thought when people get Alzheimer’s, they’re done, because there’s no medicine to cure it. But there’s so much we can do to have an impact and improve their quality of life.”
Not all of the nursing home residents have Alzheimer’s. Doug Brown, the youngest member of the music therapy group at 57, has a brain tumour called glioblastoma, the same type as Sen John McCain.
Originally from Mississippi, Brown played in an Irish folk band in the 1980s, his friend Cris Noll said. The couple are huge music fans, and met by literally bumping into each other in line at a Paul McCartney appearance in London in 1997.
Brown worked as a computer programming analyst and lived with Noll until last year, when he began losing some of his rational thought, and Noll became afraid to leave him alone. So Brown moved into the nursing home last year, where he remains seemingly content, though Noll called his disease ‘heartbreaking.’ He doesn’t know what day it is, or when it was his birthday recently.
But when it comes to music, Noll said, “He loves watching the musicians play. He sang the songs. Even in his condition, it’s funny how music will spark a memory.”
After some of the sessions, Brown borrowed a musician’s guitar and found he could still play the Eagles’ Peaceful Easy Feeling.
Another resident, Verna Sadock, was a well-known courtroom sketch artist in Chicago for years, covering trials of the Chicago 7, singer R. Kelly, and former governor Rod Blagojevich, producing drawings that were seen on the nightly news. She lived in Lake Point Tower with her husband, Bob Hirsch, sold paintings in local galleries and attended concerts in Millennium Park. But without her work, her thoughts became disjointed. She began hanging out in her building’s lobby, had trouble finding her way home and started speaking out at inopportune times, such as in the middle of a concert, a symptom of the dementia invading her mind. She moved to the nursing home last year.
From the time as a toddler when she climbed on a chair and started drawing on the wall, Hirsch said, Sadock’s first love was visual arts, and her paintings decorate her room, some depicting a lone, fashionably-dressed woman, possibly herself in exotic locales. But her parents were musicians, and she was also musical, flabbergasting onlookers some years ago when she borrowed an accordion and played Lady of Spain. When the therapists came to perform, she clapped, smiled, and played the tambourine.
“It really got to her,” Hirsch said. “I could see she was engaged.”
“The thing you learn about Alzheimer’s is, you have to help the patient enjoy life in the moment,” she said. “It provides a lot of enjoyment for him in the moment.” –Chicago Tribune/TNS