Impact of a Standardized Music Therapy Protocol on the Quality of Life of Patients With Abnormal Movements Treated With Continuous Electrical Neuromodulation

The study of the impact of music on emotional, motor and cognitive aspects remains recent. Music therapy has experienced a major boom over the last half century thanks to neuroradiological techniques for investigating the brain, and in particular in vivo functional MRI. Brain imaging has also made it possible to highlight and analyse certain activations of the networks concerned during the passive listening of music (receptive music therapy) but also during the playing of a musical instrument and/or the use of the voice (active music therapy). The accumulated data in music neurophysiology is now considerable \[1\]. Music therapy has thus been associated with motor rehabilitation in the case of acquired (stroke) and/or degenerative (Parkinson's disease) pathologies and has also been proposed as a means of pain relief. However, although proposed in the middle of the 20th century as a potentially therapeutic tool, music therapy has not managed to prove sufficiently effective to be validated in medicine. One of the limitations remains the intervention of numerous subjective factors, notably in the establishment of "protocols" and the absence of standardisation in their very structures. Each year, the "Resistant Brain Pathology" unit of the Department of Neurosurgery takes care of more than a hundred patients who have benefited from treatment with Continuous Electrical Neuromodulation (CEN) in order to respond to a motor symptomatology that is resistant to the usual treatments. The benefits of DBS in the management of abnormal movements have been demonstrated \[2\]. However, this symptomatic treatment does not exclude a worsening of the underlying pathology over time, thereby increasing latent anxiety and promoting the fragility of otherwise severely disabled patients. The management of chronic diseases requires the expertise of a multidisciplinary team so that each aspect contributing to the quality of life of patients can be assessed and supported as best as possible.