Music has charms to soothe those having a catheter test

March 8, 2006 -- Today the Mainichi Daily News (Tokyo) site posted a short unsigned item reporting that nurse researchers have found that patients who listened to their favorite music during cardiac catheter tests had lower blood pressure and felt more relaxed. The piece could have told us more about the Hokkaido hospital researchers. It does not even name the lead researcher, whom it briefly quotes. But it's still an unusual and laudable example of mainstream press coverage of important nursing research. And it even manages to explain why the research is important: "When patients become tense and their arteries tighten during the tests, it is easy for the catheters to cause damage to the arteries."

The piece, "Music found to decrease blood pressure of catheter test patients," reports that the research was conducted by nurses at Iwamizawa Municipal General Hospital. They surveyed patients' reactions to the tests by measuring their blood pressure when they first entered the exam room, and again 20 minutes later, after the catheters were inserted. The researchers found that the blood pressure of patients who listened to "enka, classical music or other music they liked" dropped by an average of 44 mm Hg (millimeters of mercury). (Enka is mournful, traditional Japanese pop music (listen to an audiofile of enka in Real Player).) The blood pressure of patients who listened to "nature-related sounds like the sound of waves or birds chirping" dropped an average of 26 mm Hg, but the blood pressure of those who did not listen to anything increased by an average of 6 mm Hg. Patients were also asked to rate their own levels of relaxation, and those who listened to music reported more relaxed states than those in the other groups.

The piece quotes "a nurse in the hospital's cardiovascular department, who headed the survey," as saying: "When nervous patients take cardiac catheter tests, perhaps they can ask the hospital to play their favorite music." The nurses reportedly plan to announce their findings later this month at a meeting of the Japanese Circulation Society in Nagoya.

We commend the Mainichi Daily News for this report. It tells the public that nurses are health professionals who initiate key scientific advances, a point that is not often made in the mainstream media.

The original article "Music found to decrease blood pressure of catheter test patients" appears to no longer be available, but you can see a web archive of the Mainichi Daily News article.

Monsters and Critics also covered the story.

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