As if staying in an intensive care unit isn’t traumatizing enough, a large proportion of people treated in ICUs develop delirium. Hallucinations make their hospital stay more traumatizing, and can even increase the risk of developing post-ICU complications such as PTSD or memory loss. But researchers from Indiana University are now running a clinical trial to find out if listening to music can reduce the effects of delirium or even stop it from developing in the first place.
A new trial will test whether hearing slow tempo music through noise-cancelling headphones reduces … [+]
Doctors still don’t fully know why people develop delirium while they stay in the ICU, but they’ve noticed that it occurs more often among patients who are put on a ventilator. This has been a problem for many years, but it was of course exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic. In a Guardian article in 2021, intensive care psychologist Dorothy Wade shared some of the scary hallucinations that people were having in the ICU. She quoted one patient as saying, “last night the porters took me down to the basement in a supermarket trolley. I was met by hooded monks who stole my soul and turned me into a zombie. I woke up in my own coffin.”
Even though such hallucinations usually disappear once people are discharged from the ICU, they can have lasting effects. Some people develop long-term memory loss or PTSD after their stay in the ICU.
Babar Khan, of the Regenstrief Institute and the Indiana University School of Medicine, has been researching ICU delirium for years. He previously developed the CAM-ICU-7 scale that helps ICU staff to assess the severity of a patient’s delirium. But he is also looking for ways to prevent delirium from happening in the first place.
Khan and his colleagues have launched a clinical trial that measures whether listening to music can reduce the odds that ICU ventilator patients develop delirium. This idea didn’t come out of nowhere: the team previously did a pilot study where they let patients listen to an audiobook, slow tempo music, or music of their own choice. Based on that they found that it was feasible to have patients listen to music in the ICU, and they designed their current trial to measure exactly how much of an effect slow music would have.
Slow tempo music is already able to reduce anxiety when people are on a ventilator, but this new study will also show how many fewer days of delirium patients will have as a result of listening to music for two hours a day over the course of a week.
In a statement to the Regenstrief Institute, Khan said “we are conducting this study to firmly establish that music reduces delirium in ICU patients who are mechanically ventilated, with the goal of music listening as anti-delirium therapy becoming the standard of care for patients in ICUs across the country.”
Once the results of the trial are out, these could be used by ICU staff to decide whether to offer music therapy to their patients. But even without this study, music already reduces anxiety in the ICU so it can’t hurt to let patients listen to some tunes to make their stay in the hospital more bearable. If it also reduces the chance of delirium, that’s even better.
