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Arts & Communication Music therapy and elderly people in home care

A B

C

Figure 2. Scores of the system of music therapy evaluation for people with Alzheimer’s and other dementias scale for the development areas that exhibited
significance (*P ≤ 0.05, final vs. initial evaluations) in the control and intervention groups. (A) Communication and language, (B) social-emotional, and
(C) total. The horizontal bar refers to the average of scores.

therapy for the composition of the evaluative tool. Future not receive music therapy. These findings are consistent
research has the potential to further improve the protocol with other studies mentioned in Section 1 of this article,
used and encourage the development of assessment tools which also demonstrated significant improvements in
in music therapy specific to elderly patients in individual various aspects of life for elderly individuals who underwent
home care. music therapy, including psychological, emotional,
The comparative analyses between the initial and cognitive, and motor-behavioral domains [9-11,13,20-22,24-27,29,30] .
final evaluations within each group reveal statistically The present research group is currently engaged in new
significant improvements in various dimensions of health interdisciplinary research to further evaluate, among
for the intervention group. These areas of improvement others, the cognitive changes facilitated by music therapy,
include oral and gross motricity, perception, receptive building on the results obtained in this study.
and expressive communication or language, musicality, The music therapy procedures developed for the
social-emotional dimension, and self-knowledge. It is evaluation sessions successfully addressed all the abilities
important to note that the observed improvements in the evaluated by the scales. In future studies and applications
intervention group are particularly relevant considering of the evaluation protocol used in this work, the choice of
the small sample size, the short intervention period, and music therapy procedures is flexible, depending on the
the generally poor prognosis for rehabilitation within this context and available tools. The key is to maintain the same
population. While there was no statistically significant script of evaluated items during assessments. The music
difference between the initial and final evaluations in the therapy activities developed and the related evaluation items
control group, the average scores obtained during the applied in the research aimed to encompass all dimensions
evaluations performed at the end of the research were of life. This is made possible by the constructs divided into
lower in almost all dimensions compared to the initial different domains within these music therapy scales, offering
evaluations. This decline is a noteworthy observation, a comprehensive multidimensional approach. Consequently,
indicating a decline in health for elderly patients who did the results point to the importance of music therapy as

Volume 1 Issue 2 (2023) 7 https://doi.org/10.36922/ac.0396