A new study carried out by the Ohio State University revealed that music is helpful against epilepsy. Researchers have discovered that the brains of individuals who suffer from epilepsy might benefit a lot more from listening to music than the individuals who do not suffer from the condition.
Scientists believe that the recent discovery could possibly lead to the creation of new treatments that could be able to prevent the seizures from taking place.
In a recent study which was presented at the 123rd Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, scientists at the OSU’s Wexner Medical Center, which were led by Dr. Christine Charyton, a neurology professor, analyzed the effects of music, like jazz and classical on the brains of patients suffering from epilepsy in order make a potential intervention to aid those people in coping with their conditions.
Around 80 percent of all cases of epilepsy are believed to be epilepsy of the temporal lobe, which means that the seizures of the patients originate from the temporal lobe of their brains. Charyton and her team of researchers described how they wanted to analyze the possible impacts of music on the brains of epilepsy patients, seeing how music is processed by the auditory complex inside the same region where the temporal lobe is located.
The scientists analyzed the ability of patients who are suffering from epilepsy to process the music by putting electrodes on their scalps and recording the patters of their brainwaves inside a process called electroencephalogram. They later compared the results gather to those from people without epilepsy.
Inside the experiment, the people were asked to listen to 10 minutes of complete silence, followed by music tracks, such as Sonata in D Major by Mozart, My Favorite Things by John Coltrane and Andante Movement II. After this they were asked to listen to 10 more minutes of silence and then to another of the music tracks. The session was ended by asking the patients to listen to another 10 minutes of complete silence.
The scientists discovered higher levels of activity in the waves from the participants who listened to the music. Even more important than this is that Charyton said that the activity in the brainwave from the people suffering of epilepsy was observed to synchronize with the music more inside the temporal lobe when compared to the people without the condition.
The scientists theorized that the new discoveries may help develop a new intervention that could prove to be helpful in treating epilepsy.
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