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Music And Neuroscience against Dementia: from Designs to Outcomes through Listening Interventions Inclusively Informed for Individuals
Music And Neuroscience against Dementia: from Designs to Outcomes through Listening INterventions INclusively INformed for INdividuals
Organisers: Jessica Jiang, Lucy Core, Laura Bolton, Emilie Brotherhood, Yvonne Cheng, Julia Foellmer, Tabitha Tuckett, Sara Adhitya, Anna Volkmer, Nick Tyler, Seb Crutch, Jason Warren
About the project
This project taps the current intense public interest in music as an intervention in dementia. Neuroscientific work led by our collaboration at UCL since 2005 has given us a detailed picture of the musical brain in dementia: in this project, we aim to harness the findings of brain science to inform ecologically- and personally-relevant, scalable musical interventions that promote well-being and social engagement in patients with Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia.
In its first year, we set up the project infrastructure, consolidated and expanded the collaborative team (now including colleagues from clinical neurology, music therapy, speech and language therapy, neuropsychology and engineering, as well as performing musicians) and engaged a PhD student to lead the work. The first publication from the project, highlighting the importance of music as a person-centred intervention in dementia, has appeared in the British Medical Journal, attracting >5000 hits to date. You can read it here.
We are now collecting data from patient-caregiver dyads living with Alzheimer’s and frontotemporal dementia, and further refining the experimental protocol in consultation with lay stakeholders. We hope that the insights, data and practical expertise amassed by this project will position UCL and our collaborators at the cutting edge of research to develop musical interventions for people living with dementia and their caregivers.
Jochum J. van‘t Hooft 1,2,3, Elia Benhamou 1, Claudia Albero Herreros 1, Jessica Jiang 1, Benjamin Levett 1, Lucy B. Core 1, Mai-Carmen Requena-Komuro 1, Chris J. D. Hardy 1, Betty M. Tijms 2,3, Yolande A. L. Pijnenburg 2,3 and Jason D. Warren 1
Image credit: The image is open source, with no attribution needed.