Music during eye surgery lowers blood pressure
Older adults who listened to their choice of music during outpatient eye surgery had significantly lower heart rates, blood pressures, and cardiac workloads than patients who did not listen to music, a study at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York shows.
In addition, when asked to rate how the surgery affected them, the music-listeners rated themselves as significantly less anxious and better at coping with the experience than patients who did not listen to music.
Karen Allen, PhD, a pioneer researcher on the effect of music on cardiovascular response to stress, and Lawrence Golden, MD, a clinical professor of medicine at the University at Buffalo, presented the study at the annual meeting of the MacLean, VA-based American Psychosomatic Society.
Music was responsible for two effects, both important to successful surgery, Allen says: It decreased stress on the cardiovascular system and helped patients relax.
"If this were a drug intervention, people would be clamoring for it," says Allen, a research scientist in the University at Buffalo Department of Medicine and Millard Fillmore Health System. "Patients like it, it’s cheap and effective, and it has no negative side effects.
Forty cataract or glaucoma patients ranging in age from 51 to 88 took part in the study. Patients in the experimental group listened to music through headphones before, during, and after surgery. Those in the control group did not listen to music.
Heart rate and blood pressure of all patients shot up the morning of surgery, Allen says, indicating that ambulatory surgery may be more stressful in this population than commonly believed. These measures of stress dropped significantly in the music group within 10 minutes of tuning in and remained low, results showed.
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