Can music help people with neurological conditions move better? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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People with Parkinson’s disease often have difficulty walking. Now a new study undertaken in the Center for Music and Medicine at Johns Hopkins aims to use music to help improve walking ability. Alex Pantelyat, a neurologist and study director, says it looks like music really helps.

Pantelyat: The results are not yet published but I’m happy to tell you that they’re very promising when it comes to enabling people with Parkinson disease to walk more rhythmically and to walk more. One of the key things we need to encourage all of our patients, whether it’s Alzheimer disease, Parkinson disease or other illnesses, to do is to move more and particularly get at least a moderate level of aerobic exercise. The goal is to enable people to walk more rhythmically and to walk more. And we were double people’s amount of moderate intensity walking from baseline to the end of the one month pilot study.  :33

Pantelyat looks forward to using music to help improve walking in other movement disorders as well. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.