Effects of music therapy on the stress of adults: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Abstract

Objectives: Music therapy, has been used to alleviate stress, but there is still little evidence of how to use it. Therefore, in this study, we tried to find the clinical trials that have been done in the past and provide the evidence for them. Methods/Statistical analysis: Six national and international databases were used to retrieve and collect RCT literature published up to March 9 of 2017.The research was independently selected by two researchers based on core questions, selection and exclusion criteria, and the flow chart of PRISMA was used to describe the status of the literature selection process in detail. Ten articles were included in the qualitative analysis and seven articles were included in the quantitative synthesis using the RevMan software ver. 5.3. Findings: Comparisons between the music listening group and the non-treated control group resulted in a reduction of 1.08 points of subjective stress(n=257; mean difference, -1.08; confidence interval (CI) 95%, -1.55 to -0.60), and the effect size between the group and the control group was statistically significant (Z=4.41, p