Health Train Express: NIH awards $20 million over five years to bring together music therapy and neuroscience

Wednesday, September 25, 2019

NIH awards $20 million over five years to bring together music therapy and neuroscience | National Institutes of Health (NIH)

Research builds on the Sound Health Initiative, an NIH-Kennedy Center partnership in association with the National Endowment for the Arts.

"There is so much we still don’t know about the effects of music in health broadly, and this partnership aims to explore this uncharted territory."
-Dr. Francis Collins, NIH Director

"If people understood the power of arts in our lives, it would affect the way we make arts accessible to everyone."
-Renée Fleming, Kennedy Center Artistic Advisor at Large

The National Institutes of Health has awarded $20 million over five years to support the first research projects of the Sound Health initiative to explore the potential of music for treating a wide range of conditions resulting from neurological and other disorders. The National Endowment for the Arts contributed funds toward these awards. While music therapy has been in practice for many years, Sound Health research aims to advance our understanding of music’s mechanism of action in the brain and how it may be applied more broadly to treat symptoms of disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, stroke, chronic pain and many more. The research will also seek to understand the effect of music on the developing brain of children.

“We know that the beat of a metronome can steady the gait of someone with Parkinson’s disease, for example, but we don’t fully understand how that happens,” said NIH Director Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D. “If we can pinpoint in the brain how music therapy works through the use of imaging and biomarkers, the hope is that we can improve its effectiveness and apply it more broadly to improve the lives of millions of people who suffer from neurological and other disorders.”

Through a series of workshops beginning in January 2017 that involved neuroscientists, music therapists, and supporters of both biomedical research and the arts, NIH developed the Sound Health research plan that informed today’s grant awards. With funding from 10 NIH institutes, centers and offices, Sound Health awardees will:

Investigate the impact of music and singing on the walking ability and gait of people with Parkinson’s disease and older adults, and how these methods influence the brain.
Study how repeated exposure to music — including songs stuck in your head sometimes referred to as earworms — contribute to the creation and consolidation of memories, and how music serves as a cue for retrieving associated memories even when memory structures of the brain involved in effortful memory retrieval are damaged, as in Alzheimer’s disease.
Analyze data from longitudinal studies that define growth curves of brain and behavior from childhood to adulthood to learn how brains are shaped by music and how musical training affects attention, executive function, social/emotional functioning, and language skills.
Examine mechanisms underlying the effects of music intervention on improving early speech and later language learning for developing infants, specifically those at-risk for speech and language disorders.
Assess the effects of active music interventions on multiple biomarkers to provide a more holistic understanding of how active music interventions work to mitigate cancer-related stress and its potential to improve immune function.
Study musical rhythm synchronization as a mechanism of healthy social development and how that is disrupted in children with an autism spectrum disorder, with the goal of developing music interventions for social communication.

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