Children recovering from heart surgery or other serious heart conditions often experience significant physical and emotional stress during their stay in the cardiac intensive care unit. While music therapy is commonly used to provide comfort and reduce anxiety, its effects on the body’s physiology have not been well understood. A study published in Pediatric Cardiology used continuous, high-resolution physiologic monitoring to examine how children responded to music therapy in the cardiac intensive care unit. The results showed that music therapy was associated with measurable improvements in physiologic markers related to circulation and oxygen delivery, with the greatest benefits observed in children who actively participated by singing, clapping, or engaging with the music. 

These findings suggest that music therapy may provide benefits beyond emotional support by promoting favorable physiologic changes during recovery, says lead author Rohit S. Loomba, MD, MS, Attending Physician in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. The study demonstrates how continuous physiologic monitoring can help researchers better understand the effects of both medical and supportive therapies in critically ill children. Dr. Loomba is also the Director of Clinical Research and the Director of Cardiac Morphology at Lurie Children’s Heart Center and Associate Professor of Pediatrics (Cardiology) at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Key Takeaways

  • Music therapy was associated with measurable improvements in children’s physiology, including markers related to blood flow and oxygen delivery, suggesting it may support recovery in addition to providing comfort.
  • Children who actively participated in music therapy by singing, clapping, or playing simple instruments experienced the greatest physiologic benefits, highlighting the value of active engagement.
  • Continuous bedside monitoring allowed researchers to measure the body’s response to music therapy in real time, providing new insights that would not have been possible with traditional spot measurements.
  • The findings support music therapy as a safe, non-invasive addition to routine care for children recovering from serious heart conditions.
  • This research demonstrates how advanced physiologic monitoring can be used to better understand the effects of supportive therapies and guide future strategies to improve the care and recovery of critically ill children.

Future Research 

The next step is to conduct a prospective study that examines the effects of music therapy in greater detail. In particular, the study will focus on entrainment, or the way a child’s heart rate, breathing, and other physiologic signals may gradually align with rhythm, tempo, and other elements of music during therapy. More broadly, this work is part of a larger effort to understand how supportive therapies affect the body in real time. By using continuous, high-resolution physiologic monitoring, researchers hope to identify which children benefit most from music therapy, how those benefits occur, and how music therapy can be more intentionally used to support recovery in children with heart disease.

Lurie Children’s Collaborators 

Grant Hales, Senior Music Therapist at Lurie Children’s; Wesam Sourour, MD, Attending Physician of Cardiology at Lurie Children’s and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics (Cardiology) at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine; and Kendra Ward, MD, MSCI, Attending Physician of Cardiology at Lurie Children’s and Associate Professor of Pediatrics (Cardiology) at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine collaborated on the study with Dr. Loomba.  

Pediatric research at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago is conducted through Stanley Manne Children’s Research Institute.