Technological prospecting of music therapy in Alzheimer's disease

Murilo Bastos,Deise Mara Soares,Juliana Sartori Bonini,Eduardo Muzzolon,Valquiria Camargo Lins,Juliana Maria Silva,Weber Cláudio Francisco Nunes Da Silva,Kelby Cavalheiro De Mendonça

doi:10.33448/rsd-v10i16.22316

Abstract

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is characterized by cognitive impairment and progressive memory loss and drug treatments have limited efficacy. Thus, non-pharmacological interventions, such as music therapy, have shown to be promising as supporting pharmacological treatment and, therefore, may arouse commercial interest regarding the development of this type of product. Thus, this study aims to carry out a patentometric survey on patent registrations with music therapy in the treatment of AD. A systematic search was carried out from 2000 to 2020 on the Orbti-Questel website, searching for documents referring to music therapies in AD. The terms “Alzheimer music methodology active therapy” and “Alzheimer music methodology passive therapy” were used. After searching, reading, and excluding duplicate results, we found four patent families referring to music therapy in AD and all were selected as a result, which was considered little compared to the number of studies published on the subject.

Highlights

The increase observed in the elderly population worldwide is accompanied by a rise in the number of elderly people diagnosed with dementia
Music therapy is a type of non-pharmacological intervention that applies the effects of sounds, music, and movements, which theoretically integrate with cognition and behavior, stimulating interpersonal relationships, non-verbal communication, creativity, emotions, and psychiatric symptoms (Cooke et al, 2010; Lyu et al, 2018 and Raglio et al, 2010)
This study proposed to review patents registered so far in the use of music therapy as a supporting treatment for Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and to carry out an analysis of the theoretical basis of these inventions

Summary

Introduction

The increase observed in the elderly population worldwide is accompanied by a rise in the number of elderly people diagnosed with dementia. Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is the most common dementia (Nichols et al, 2019), which can be defined as a complex and insidious neurodegenerative disease, in which the first symptoms appear even before the probable diagnosis. The main characteristic is intense synaptic degeneration and neuronal loss, leading to a progressive and constant decline in communication, memory and orientation functions (Atri, 2019 and Tiwari et al, 2019). Since the evolution of AD symptoms causes a progressive and irreversible loss in the autonomy of patients and that the main function of the drug treatment of the disease only attenuates and mitigates the progression of symptoms of this pathology (Olazarán et al, 2010), the search for alternative and non-pharmacological therapies, at a lower cost, can contribute to increasing the quality of life of patients with AD. When listening to familiar songs, elderly peoples memory is activated, stimulating areas inside and outside the temporal lobe, including frontal and parietal regions (Jacobsen et al, 2015; and Platel et al, 2003 and Satoh et al.., 2006)

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