Influence of music therapy on the rehabilitation of children with severe brain damage Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience
authors
keywords
- Rehabilitation
- Children
- ERPs
- Music therapy
- Neurological disorders
document type
ARTabstract
The aim of this experiment was to test for the efficiency of a music therapy (MT) program implemented at the Centro Internacional de RestauracionNeurologica (CIREN), La Habana, Cuba. All the children who participated in this study had severe neurological disorders and were involved in an intense neuro-restoration program for 4 to 8 weeks. Children were randomly assigned to the MT group or to a control group. Overall results from questionnaires filled in by the occupational and speech therapists showed that all children improved from Week 1 to Week 4 on three dimensions (motor, social and emotional behaviours).Importantly, improvements on the motor behaviour dimension were larger for children in the experimental MT group than for children in the control group. Moreover, results in the MT group revealed that improvements on musical tests were larger after 8 weeks than after 4 weeks of MT. Finally, although analyses of the Event-Related brain Potentials (ERPs) showed large inter-individual variability, it was nevertheless possible to isolate subgroups of children with similar patterns of results (P250 vs N300 components). Taken together, these results are encouraging in showing that the use of different methodologies can provide complementary information on the efficiency of neuro-restoration and MT programs
