Music Therapy for Children with Cerebral Palsy: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Background: Using music as a healing influence to affect health and behavior dates back to ancient times. It was formalized as a therapy in the early 1800’s. Today Music Therapy is a recognized discipline taught in universities throughout the world. Music Therapy is used in both physical and psychosocial practice. Recent studies have shown the added value of using Music Therapy in conjunction with other therapies to enhance the results of patient progress. Furthermore, music therapy is a safe and low-cost intervention that could potentially be offered by trained professional working in many settings. The use of Music Therapy in children with Cerebral Palsy is rare and has never been reported systematically before. To understand what has been accomplished it is necessary to study a variety of cases where professionals used Music Therapy in the treatment of children with Cerebral Palsy and attempt to develop a presentation of the methods and results. It is anticipated that this may evoke a new study or collection of available data used in another group of patients in the future. Objectives: To study the effects of Music Therapy on the treatment of children with Cerebral Palsy. Methods: The MEDLINE electronic databases from PubMed were used as sources for the research. All Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) were selected. Only in English were considered. Results: Music Therapy helped to increase the results in all five studies. Conclusions: Even though all participants in the five included studies are children with cerebral palsy, the results of these studies cannot specifically compared due to the different types of interventions and outcomes measured. More primary research is needed to attain the high quality of evidence based practice which can be used for reference in the future.