Music-based interventions can improve stroke, Parkinson s disease
Music-based interventions have become a core ingredient of effective neurorehabilitation in the past 20 years thanks to the growing body of knowledge.
In this theme issue of
Neurorehabilitation, experts in the field highlight some of the current critical gaps in clinical applications that have been less thoroughly investigated, such as post-stroke cognition, traumatic brain injury, and autism and specific learning disabilities.
Neurologic Music Therapy is the clinical and evidence-based use of music interventions by a credentialed professional. Research in the 1990s showed for the first time how musical-rhythmic stimuli can improve mobility in stroke and Parkinson s disease patients. We now know that music-based interventions can effectively address a wide range of impairments in sensorimotor, speech/language, and cognitive functions.
The important role of music in neurorehabilitation: Filling in critical gaps eurekalert.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from eurekalert.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
2Department of Neurology, University of Colorado Health, Fort Collins, CO, USA
3SRH Neurorehabilitation Hospital Bad Wimpfen, Bad Wimpfen, Germany
Entrainment is defined by a temporal locking process in which one system’s motion or signal frequency entrains the frequency of another system. This process is a universal phenomenon that can be observed in physical (e.g., pendulum clocks) and biological systems (e.g., fire flies). However, entrainment can also be observed between human sensory and motor systems. The function of rhythmic entrainment in rehabilitative training and learning was established for the first time by Thaut and colleagues in several research studies in the early 1990s. It was shown that the inherent periodicity of auditory rhythmic patterns could entrain movement patterns in patients with movement disorders (see for a review: Thaut et al., 1999). Physiological, kinematic, and behavioral movement analysis showed very quickly that entrainment cues not only change