While music has been used for thousands of years as an antidote for illness, modern physicians are just now beginning to understand how the brains of patients respond to music - physicians like Dr. Ali Rezai from the Cleveland Clinic, who is currently conducting a study to better understand how neurons in the brain respond to music.

Dr. Rezai and other neurosurgeons from the Cleveland Clinic asked The Cleveland Orchestra to compose new classical pieces that would be played to patients during a type of surgery called deep brain stimulation, which is performed while patients with Parkinson's disease are awake. During surgery, Dr. Rezai gauges how individual neurons fire when the patients hear the unfamiliar chords and cadences, then compares those reactions to the behavior of neurons when familiar songs fill the OR. Hair-sized sensors placed in the brain translate the neuron signals to an amplifier. Patients let him know when they find the music soothing and Dr. Rezai can hear the corresponding changes in a single neuron. Says Dr. Rezai, "We know music can calm, influence creativity, can energize. That's great. But music's role in recovering from disease is being ever more appreciated." Results from the study are expected within six months.

Another study is about to get underway. Dr. Claudius Conrad, a senior surgical resident at Harvard Medical School and gifted pianist, will soon launch the first study of music's impact on the sleep cycles of acute-care patients. While at the University of Munich prior to his Harvard Medical School residency, Dr. Conrad was able to demonstrate that critically ill patients required fewer sedative drugs after listening to one hour of Mozart piano sonatas. He expected that blood pressure and heart rates would lower with the music, which they did. "Research has already shown that if you play a piece - like Mozart - at a certain slow beat, the listener will adapt their heart beat to the beat of the music," he notes. But what he found especially surprising is that the patients experienced a 50 percent increase in pituitary growth hormone, which is known for stimulating healing.

Today, Dr. Conrad always asks his surgical intensive care patients if they'd like to listen to music - and if they say yes, but don't indicate which kind, he often selects Mozart. Such classical composers are chosen frequently by physicians like Dr. Conrad who use music as a healing tool. Apparently, according to a soon-to-be-published study by researchers from New Jersey's Gagnon Cardiovascular Institute at Morristown Memorial Hospital, the vibrations of stringed instruments are said to mesh with the energy of the heart, small intestine, pericardium, thyroid and adrenal glands.

News Release: Music as medicine: Docs use tunes as treatment  www.msnbc.msn.com June 1, 2009