Your Health: Medwatch

Sounds Good
Arthritis Today, NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2006
by Denise Lynn Mann

Music calms the savage "pain beast."

Music is like exercise. What you do for exercise doesn’t matter as much as the fact that you do it. And what you listen to doesn’t matter, as long as you listen, according to new research in the Journal of Advanced Nursing.

Music can decrease the pain, depression and disability that commonly occur among people with osteoarthritis (OA), rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and other non-cancerous types of chronic pain, according to research done at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Ohio. People who listened to music for one hour a day for one week – whether they picked the tunes themselves or researchers provided them – felt more empowered and reported less pain, depression and disability than those who did not listen to music. Average pain ratings among people who listened to music fell by about 20 percent, whereas pain among non-listeners actually increased.

Cue up your compact disc player or charge up your iPod, because your brain responds to the music you hear, explains osteopathic physician Steven Stanos, medical director, Chronic Pain Care Center at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.

“We think music stimulates areas of the brain that are responsible for releasing the body’s own painkillers,” he says. “Music stimulates the periaqueductal gray (PAG) area in the mid-brain, which is where we have our own opioid system.” 

Imaging studies have shown that music can stimulate the brain’s pleasure center, increasing levels of the brain chemicals dopamine, which produces feelings of enjoyment, and substance P, which inhibits pain. And there is evidence from brain scans that music can block the area of the brain called the amygdala that is responsible for negative emotions such as stress, says Dr. Stanos.