Music therapy for dementia treatment. A proposal for intervention in nursing homes.

Abstract

Dementia is a syndrome that is affecting more and more people.The most common disease is Alzheimer’s, which is a progressive and degenerative syndrome that affects memory, thought, behavior, emotions and personality. Cognitive reserve is a protective factor for dementias, and there are non-pharmacological treatments that help to increase that cognitive reserve. Here, music plays an important role in remembering forgotten memories. Music therapy can be a very complete support tool to stimulate people with dementia. It can help them to maintain that residual memory and to recover memories associated with music that they thought they had lost. The goal of this project is to determinate the beneficts of music therapy in people with dementia. The duration
of the project is 12 weeks, where two of them are dedicated to evaluations, another two to individual interventions, and the remaining eight to group interventions. Individual interventions are based on behavioral model, and group interventions are based on a sequencing proposal by Mateos Hernández. Once it is completed, improvements in cognitive levels, remembering past events,
symptoms of anxiety, depression and lonesomeness are expected.