Musical Activity and Cognitive Aging

Musical Activity and Cognitive Aging

Musical and Cognitive

The study was aimed at evaluating the association between participation in musical instrumentation and the concept of cognitive aging. The researchers thus set out to evaluate the neuropsychological profiles of the adults in the study based on their previous experience with musical instrumentation as compared to those who had never had any such experience. The subjects in the study were classified in accordance with their participation as amateur musicians throughout their life span and not according to their current participation with musical instruments. Recruitment of subjects was conducted at the Landon Center on Aging using the normal control database located at the University of Kansas Medical Center (KUMC). All subjects had to give written informed consent for ethicality of the study and to comply with the standards for research set by the KUMC Human Subjects Committee and the Helsinki declaration Hanna-Pladdy and MacKay 379()

Participants

The study sample was seventy adults aged between 60 and 83 years of age. They were characterized in three different levels based on their level of musical activity over their lifespan. The three groups were matched based on their age, education and gender to ensure that there was almost equal representation of both males and females. All participants in the study were native speakers of English and were strongly right-handed. This was determined using the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory. They all also had normal cognition within the normal limits set by the Mini-Mental Status Examination. They were all healthy individuals and were completely independent in their daily living activities. They did not display any signs or symptoms of neurologic or psychiatric disease and were not under any current alcohol or drug substance. They also were not currently suffering from depression. The three groups of participants did not show any significant differences in their responses to the exercise questionnaire that was desired to quantify the frequency and duration of their aerobic and anaerobic exercises Hanna-Pladdy and MacKay 379-80()

The three groups of participants were the non-musicians who were twenty one in number and consisted of those who had never received any formal training on being instrumental musicians and could also not play any musical instrument nor read music. The second group was the low activity musicians who were 27 in number. This consisted of the individuals who had between one and nine years of experience in playing musical instruments, had received some formal training and could read music. The last group was the high activity musicians who were the individuals with more than 10 years' experience in playing musical instruments regularly. They had also received formal training in music and could read music with ease Hanna-Pladdy and MacKay 380()

Neuropsychological assessment

To determine the differences in the profiles and cognitive strengths of the three different groups of participants of the study, a neuropsychological assessment which was comprehensive was administered. The assessment was done in one session which included estimation of verbal, attention, memory, working memory, intellectual and language functions of the participants. The researchers used the American Adult Reading Test to estimate the premorbid verbal intelligence of the participants where they were required to read irregular words which cannot be pronounced correctly using the rules of phonics out loud. This provided a good estimate of the Verbal IQ of the participants on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. It was also a stable and valid measure of the premorbid intellectual functioning of the older demented and non-demented adults.

The verbal intelligence and general intellectual ability of the study participants was estimated through the administration of the information subtest of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-III and it provided a stable and valid measure despite the advanced age of the participants. The performance of the subject's verbal memory was measuring using the second edition of the California Verbal Learning Test while the performance of the non-verbal memory was measured using the third edition of the Wechsler Memory Scale using the first and second visual reproduction subtests Hanna-Pladdy and MacKay 380()