The effect of listening to the music of the patient's own or others' choice during cesarean sections on pain, and its contribution to anesthesia technicians

Abstract

To investigate the effect of listening to the music of the patient's own or others' choice during the cesarean section on the intraoperative pain of the expectant mother and its contribution to the anesthesia technicians' practice. This study is a single-centre, controlled and randomized trial involving 92 patients. During cesarean section, pregnant women in the intervention group listened to music of their own or our choice with headphones. We placed headphones on the patients in the control group but played no music. We performed cesarean sections under regional anesthesia. We collected a variety of subjective (visual analog and numerical scale for pain) and objective parameters (heart rate, blood pressure and amount of medication leftover from postoperative PCA) during the incision and suturing of the skin. We found no differences between the groups in terms of systolic-diastolic blood pressure and heart rate. However, we observed that the VAS scores in the group listening to music in the Acemashiran maqam (a melody type in Turkish classical music) were lower than the control group (p=0.02). On the other hand, there was no difference between the VAS scores of patients listening to the music of their own choice and that of the group listening to music in the Acemashiran maqam or from the control group (p>0.05). At the end of the study, 87.5% of the patients liked the music preferences, while 93.8% desired to listen to music during the next cesarean section. Listening to music reduces patients' pain during cesarean section. Comparisons with the control group showed that the effect of music in the Acemashiran maqam on pain was even more pronounced than that of the patient's own choice.