symposium

Abstract

Aphasia is a language disorder in which the language centers of the cerebral cortex are affected by stroke or trauma, resulting in difficulty understanding and expressing language without damage to the auditory or speech organs themselves. There are several types of aphasia, including Broca's aphasia, Wernicke's aphasia, amnesic aphasia, and global aphasia. The number of patients in Japan is said to be as high as 300,000 or 500,000, but the exact number is not known. This paper will discuss the evidence for music therapy for aphasia. A search for "music therapy" and "aphasia" in the Cochrane Library, a collection of multiple medical information databases focusing on systematic reviews, yielded 9 hits in Cochrane Reviews (1/25/2022). A search for music therapy and "aphasia" in PubMed, a search engine for MEDLINE and other reference works and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical sciences, yielded 5 hits in Systematic Review (1/25/2022). In general, musical interventions were potentially beneficial for communication-related outcomes for people with aphasia after stroke, but the quality of the studies was generally poor. The conclusion was that the results of the studies are promising, but that higher quality randomized controlled trials of outcomes are needed before they can be recommended for clinical practice.