Alzheimer’s is far more than just memory loss – neuropsychiatric signs and symptoms can consist of nervousness, aggression and persona changes. These indicators aren’t just heartbreaking, they are marketing the burnout of caregivers. Cure is a lot more required than ever.
“People living with Alzheimer’s should have dignity in this stage of their everyday living,” stated Zach McMahon, CEO and co-founder of LUCID. “They are entitled to a procedure that is equally successful and can enrich high-quality of lifestyle for them and their caregivers.”
Before this year, LUCID’s initially randomized controlled clinical demo demonstrated scientific evidence in the reduction of acute stress within grown ups with moderate panic. With the support of JT, LUCID will translate their details-driven clinical insights into the development of a electronic therapeutic to reduce agitation and stress and anxiety in dementia care, to begin with with Alzheimer’s.
“Music interventions can ease these psychiatric symptoms and spark joy,” McMahon explained. “We’re dedicated to providing new care paradigms in an proof-dependent way.”
Now, with funding from JT, LUCID will conduct study and growth of the digital therapeutic that will be identified as LUC-101. Sheridan College’s Centre for Elder Investigate is also involved in the enhancement of LUC-101 through a Normal Sciences and Engineering Investigate Council of Canada (NSERC) initiative to assistance gerontological analysis and style and design.
LUCID will take a leadership place to deliver the electrical power of new music as drugs to individuals and caregivers globally. With LUC-101, LUCID strives to supply the added benefits of personalized tunes treatment for Alzheimer’s whilst reducing the general cost and barrier to entry by AI technologies and cloud-enabled programs.
About LUCID
LUCID develops therapeutic new music ordeals for mental health. By unlocking the electrical power of neuroscience and device finding out, LUCID’s AI curates new music encounters that are optimized for specific emotional results. They aim to present individualized, evidence-dependent, and available solutions in mental health treatment. LUCID is working in the direction of the clinical validation of songs as drugs.
JT, Japan Tobacco Inc., has a pharmaceutical business enterprise which focuses on investigation and development, producing and income of prescription prescription drugs. For a lot more information, you should check out https://www.jt.com/about/division/pharma/index.html.
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Industry Key word: Analysis OTHER Well being Normal Overall health Entertainment PHARMACEUTICAL Mental Overall health Engineering Medical TRIALS SCIENCE Audio Option Medicine OTHER Technological know-how Health and fitness
Songs can take it easy you, provide again reminiscences of sure periods in your everyday living or provide a smile to your facial area.
Study reveals a distinct backlink concerning health and audio: new music treatment can be employed to enable fight melancholy and mend trauma, and listening to audio has been shown to decrease coronary heart price, lower blood tension and decrease stress stages.
Prior to the Hartford Symphony Orchestra live performance Friday night, Javeed Sukhera, MD, PhD, chair of psychiatry, Institute of Dwelling, spoke about the heritage of the IOL and how music can be made use of for healing. The conversation with HSO Audio Director Carolyn Kuan included a candid dialogue about melancholy.
The live shows on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, sponsored by the IOL, highlighted the functions of Sergei Rachmaninoff and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, legendary artists who endured lifelong struggles with despair. Soloist Henry Kramer executed Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3, and the software also featured Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 at the Belding Theater at the Bushnell. For the Sunday matinee, Hank Schwartz, MD, psychiatrist-in-chief emeritus at the IOL, participated in the pre-concert conversation.
Kuan spoke about how Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky each struggled with melancholy, and how in a single of Tchaikovsky’s symphonies the journey from darkness to gentle can be heard in the distinct movements.
Showcasing these two artists at a time when the IOL is celebrating 200 decades as a chief in the subject of psychiatry is a poignant reminder that struggles with psychological overall health and addiction can materialize to anybody, but there is hope for recovery.
Dr. Sukhera spoke about how as a boy or girl and adolescent psychologist he believes tunes results in room for therapeutic.
“When listening to new music, little ones really feel a peace and a liberty to be on their own,” he stated. “It permits for therapeutic at the individual’s have pace.”
He reported that often he will talk about track lyrics with clients, what their favorite music are and why they resonate with them, what the lyrics mean to them and investigate their feelings and feelings via them.
He also spoke about producing playlists for diverse times in his everyday living, and how listening to them can provide him back again to that time in his earlier.
Kuan spoke about her have struggles with melancholy, and the stigma some deal with. She explained primarily with her Chinese background, it was something she struggled to occur to conditions with. “It is not one thing we communicate about in my lifestyle, it took me a prolonged time to find help,” she said. “The a lot more folks can communicate about and accept their struggles, the better.”
Dr. Sukhera explained achieving out if you are having difficulties is the bravest matter you can do. “I hope we can identify what a gift our vulnerability is,” he mentioned. “That it is component of what binds us together as a humanity.”
Colette Hall, Director of Artistic Operations at the Hartford Symphony Orchestra claimed music has a therapeutic existence. “I encourage persons to consider the time and house to love it in their individual life,” she stated.
The IOL is celebrating its 200th anniversary in 2022 and 2023 to match the a long time it was founded and incorporated. Occasions will include things like the Black & Purple gala in June and other public activities.
Kuan was appointed the 10th musical director in the 2010-11 season, as the first female and youngest music director in the record of the HSO. She is acknowledged as a person of the most impressive, interesting and excellent conductors of her technology.
The concerts showcased stunning piano solos by Kramer, who garnered a standing ovation at Friday night’s overall performance.
Dr. Sukhera spoke about the Institute of Dwelling 200th anniversary celebration and the Hartford Symphony concert on WTNH Channel 8:
Bethany Uhler Thompson didn’t know what to expect when she decided to start a youth string orchestra at Chatham Youth Development Center.
She was inspired by her uncle, who was incarcerated and had confided in her how isolating being in prison could be. Thompson used to perform with her cello in a juvenile detention center when she was younger, but she wanted to get incarcerated people involved in the community of music makers.
That’s how Chatham Strings was born.
For about two years, Chatham Strings, an orchestra made up of donated violins, cellos and one viola helped incarcerated children explore creativity, teamwork and accomplishment. COVID-19 stalled the program in 2020, and then Thompson graduated from her program and moved to California.
She hopes, however, that the impact has remained.
“There’s potential benefits to music involvement,” Thompson said, “like recovering from traumatic experiences in life, fostering a positive experience with learning and new experiences, education, and also developing interpersonal skills that are so essential to life.”
The results of Chatham Strings, which Thompson explored in her dissertation for a doctor of musical arts degree at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, are all anecdotal and correlatory, Thompson said. But some children said being involved in the program helped them try new experiences — even if they were told they were never going to succeed.
“They were discouraged from learning new things, that was part of their past,” Thompson said, “When they were given the opportunity to try something new, and they started enjoying it, and noticing a bit of success, they started saying, ‘Oh, why am I limiting myself?’”
Maybe success on the cello could transfer to success in beautician school, or math class, Thompson said.
Transformation through music
Chatham Strings was one look into the transformational powers of music, which studies suggest improve cognitive skills, health and well-being.
Just 40 miles away from Chatham Youth Development Center, Durham-based Kidznotes has boasted that participants in its out-of-school music program for students in lower-income areas have higher school attendance rates and improved academic performance. The program is based on the El Sistema model originally launched in Venezuela for children in impoverished neighborhoods to learn music.
More important than test scores, though, is the joy of music, said Shana Tucker, Kidznotes’ executive director.
“It is not something that stays,” Tucker said. “But it is something that hopefully we all experienced — at least once in our lives, at least once a week, once a day — but you’ve got to know what it is and recognize it when it comes because it dissipates.”
Tucker has spoken with countless parents who no longer play an instrument, but they can’t forget the first time they held one, how special it was.
Thompson recalled a similar reverence from the children in Chatham Strings, who, even in the midst of an argument with other students, set aside their instruments.
But is music special? What makes it different from other activities?
Nothing magical
According to Donald Hodges, professor emeritus at UNCG, there is something unique, but nothing magical about music.
“The elements of all the bits and pieces probably can be found in other things as well, for different children, different individuals,” Hodges said,
Playing music can activate different parts of the brain, Hodges said. For example, when you play a violin, your right hand, which controls the bow, controls the rhythm, while your left hand, which presses the notes on the strings, controls the melody.
After doing that activity over and over again, it creates a permanent imprint on the brain.
That kind of coordination can be found in many activities, Hodges noted. He rejects ideas that music has a mystical, uncanny quality, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t something important and uniquely human about making music.
Societies across the globe incorporate music into their daily lives, albeit in different ways. It is perhaps the human in music that makes it feel so special.
“Every musical style, if it’s your favorite, regardless of what it is,” Hodges said, “activates the part of the brain that says ‘Hey, I am a human being and this is how I feel about my humanity.’”
In recent years, research made possible through new imaging techniques that can show what the brain is doing in real-time has shown that music definitely has some neurological benefit. Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center researcher John Burdette found in a 2014 study that just listening to one’s favorite music changed the connections between auditory brain areas and the hippocampus, a part of the brain that’s “responsible for memory and social emotional consolidation.”
Other research has explored how people with dementia are able to recall music lyrics, despite profound memory loss, and a recent study found that people who started music training when young had stronger structural connections in the auditory regions of their brains.
Healing through music
Thompson taught her students how to compose music in addition to playing, allowing them to further express themselves.
The research shows that even as children accumulate such ACEs as the incarceration or loss of a parent, witnessing violence or having a close relative with mental illness, it puts them at higher risk of poor educational attainment, substance use and even physical health problems such as cancer in adulthood.
It can be hard for traumatized people to open up, Hodges said. Music can help.
One student in Chatham Strings composed a piece about the loss of a parent. The orchestra performed that piece, “Motherly Love.”
Encouraging reliability and reliance on others
Playing music and being part of an ensemble involves coordination and teamwork, but it also requires expression — as an individual and as a group.
“Everybody plays an important role,” Hodges said. “Not everybody can play first as well. So it’s a tricky balance.”
Tucker said her organization, Kidznotes, works to create a “community through music.”
“The dynamics of orchestra works is very similar to how you create an intentional community outside of the program,” she said.
Members of an orchestra support each other the same way they might support their neighbors or family members outside the orchestra. Just like in life, orchestra is more than just “playing your part,” she said.
In Chatham Strings, Thompson said students quickly realized that if one person missed class, they wouldn’t sound as good. Students then felt a responsibility not only to themselves or Thompson, but to the group itself.
“There’s a sense of responsibility,” Thompson said. “Of course, did that make them always make the right decisions? No. Does it do for any of us? But it had impact on them wanting to be responsible and be a part.”
The pandemic has affected how both groups feel that community through music.
Kidznotes was forced to go online as schools went online, and for some children that meant attending their group violin lessons from the McDonald’s parking lot because that was where there was Wi-Fi, Tucker said.
For children in school during COVID, life is hard and unpredictable, Tucker said.
The pandemic changed the way we feel community through music. But music still found a way.
As lockdowns began in countries around the world, videos of people playing trumpet or singing from their apartments circled around social media.
In the end, it comes down to joy.
That joy that music is so apt to bring is still retrievable despite the world. And that joy, that meaningful experience is something that anybody can experience, no matter your age, your cognitive ability or your numbers, Hodges said.
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by Elizabeth Thompson, North Carolina Health News January 13, 2022
