Can music help people with movement disorders like Parkinson’s disease? Elizabeth Tracey reports

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:01 — 1.4MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Strategies to help people with movement disorders like Parkinson’s disease abound, and now individually prescribed music has been added to the mix.

Alex Pantelyat, a neurologist and director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Music and Medicine, explains.

Pantelyat: What we’ve started doing, through the Johns Hopkins Center for Music and Medicine, is to work on developing precision music medicine. Individualized, targeted music-based interventions for people living with neurodegenerative conditions and moving beyond neurology as well. Music considered relaxing for most is music that approximates one’s resting heart rate, so around 50-60 beats per minute, music that tends to be instrumental, that doesn’t have too much pitch, frequency variability, rhythmic changes, something that is really identified as calm by most people.  :33

Pantelyat notes that using music may also be helpful for people with dementia. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.