Systematic Review: Music, Singing and Wellbeing Outcomes for Adults with Dementia

This is the third of three reports that form the review of self-reported subjective wellbeing outcomes of music and singing for adults and it consists of five intervention studies of participants with dementia as well as one qualitative study. We have not included clinical studies of music and singing, including interventions for patients in hospital, studies where the focus is on clinical outcomes or dementia symptom management. Studies were only included in this review where the primary or secondary study outcome related to wellbeing i.e. measured quality of life, life satisfaction, anxiety, depression and was self-reported by the person with dementia. Studies based upon proxy measures of wellbeing provided by carers, professionals or researchers were explicitly excluded to ensure comparability with our two previous reports. Given the paucity of studies evaluating music and singing interventions to promote the subjective wellbeing of people with dementia, we have included those with a historical comparator (HC) as well as those with a concurrent comparator (CC) or qualitative studies where it would not be expected to include a comparator. The methods of data extraction, quality appraisal for the studies reported here are the same as for the H1 and H2 studies and detailed in Volumes 1.