Meaningful Music in Healthcare (MiMiC): Patient study

Postoperative patients who previously engaged in the live musical intervention
Meaningful Music in Healthcare (MiMiC) reported significantly reduced
perception of pain than patients without the intervention (van der Wal- Huisman
et al., 2020). This encouraging finding indicates a potential for postsurgical
musical interventions to have a place in standard care as therapeutic pain
relief. However, live music is logistically complex in hospital settings, and
previous studies have reported the more cost-effective recorded music to serve
a similar pain-reducing function in post-surgical patients (van der Wal-
Huisman et al., 2018). Moreover, little is known about the potential underlying
physiological mechanisms that may be responsible for the reduced pain perceived
by patients after live music intervention.

The primary objective is to see whether a live music intervention can
significantly lower perceived postoperative pain compared to recorded music
intervention and do-nothing control. The secondary objective is to explore
neuroinflammatory underpinnings of postoperative pain, and the potential role
of music intervention in mitigating neuroinflammation.

This intervention study will compare subjective postsurgical pain ratings among
three groups: live music intervention, recorded music intervention, and
standard care control. The design will take the form of an on-off
non-randomized controlled trial (NCT, Mathe et al., 2015).

Intervention is a daily music session of up to 30 minutes for a maximum of five
days. The live music intervention group is visited by professional musicians
once a day for 15 minutes and asked to interact. The recorded music, active
control intervention group receives 15 minutes of pre-selected music over
headphones. The do-nothing group receives typical post-surgical care that does
not include music.

Participants will be in recovery after elective surgery in the UMCG.
Participation requires approximately 12 minutes questionnaires before surgery.
Daily data collection includes one blood sample (10ml), one hour total of EEG
recording, four times daily HR, blood pressure, respiration rate, pain rating
on a VAS, and (unless standard-care treatment) ~15 minutes of live or recorded
music intervention. As blood samples and measurements of HR, blood pressure and
respiration rate are routine measurements collected as part of standard
postoperative care, they will be integrated with standard care insofar as
possible. There are no known risks for participation. Based on past related
research (UMCG research register 201600541), patients generally seem to enjoy
the music interventions.