The Music to Improve Sleep Quality in Adults With Depression and Insomnia (MUSTAFI) trial randomly assigned more than 110 outpatients with depression to either a music intervention or a waiting list. Sleep quality and quality of life significantly improved after listening to music for half an hour at bedtime for 4 weeks.
Difficult to Resolve
The researchers note that insomnia is common in patients with depression and is “difficult to resolve.”
They note that while music is commonly used as a sleep aid and a growing evidence base suggests it has positive effects, there have been few investigations into the effectiveness of music for patients with depression-related insomnia.
To fill this research gap, 112 outpatients with depression and comorbid insomnia who were receiving care at a single center were randomly assigned to either an intervention group or a wait list control group.
Participants in the intervention group listened to music for a minimum of 30 minutes at bedtime for 4 weeks. The music was delivered via the MusicStar app, which is available as a free download from the Apple and Android (Google Play) app stores. The app was developed by Lund and Lars Rye Bertelsen, a PhD student and music therapist at Aalborg University Hospital.
The app is designed as a multicolored star, with each arm of the star linking to a playlist lasting between 30 minutes and 1 hour. Each color of the star indicates a different tempo of music.
Blue playlists, Lund explained, offer the quietest music, green is more lively, and red is the most dynamic. Gray playlists linked to project-related soundtracks, such as summer rain.
Lund said organizing the playlists by stimuli and color code, instead of genre, allows users to regulate their level of arousal and makes the music choice intuitive and easy.
She said that the genres of music include New Age, folk, pop, classical, and film soundtracks, “but no hard rock.”
“There’s actually a quite large selection of music available, because studies show that individual choice is important, as are personal preferences,” she said. She noted that the endless choices offered by streaming services can cause confusion.
“So we made curated playlists and designed them with well-known pieces, but also with newly composed music not associated with anything,” Lund said.
Participants were assessed using the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI), the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HAMD-17), and two World Health Organization well-being questionnaires (WHO-5, WHOQOL-BREF), as well as actigraphy.
Results showed that at 4 weeks, participants in the intervention group experienced significant improvements in sleep quality in comparison with control persons. The effect size for the PSQI was -2.1, and for quality of life on the WHO-5, the effect size was 8.4.
A subanalysis revealed that the length of nocturnal sleep in the intervention group increased by an average of 18 minutes during the study from a baseline of approximately 5 hours per night, said Lund.
However, there were no changes in actigraphy measurements and no significant improvements in HAMD-17 scores.
Lund said that on the basis of these positive findings, music intervention as a sleep aid is now offered at Aalborg University Hospital to patients with depression-related insomnia.
Clinically Meaningful?
Commenting on the findings for Medscape Medical News, Gerald J. Haeffel, PhD, Department of Psychology, University of Notre Dame, in Indiana, said that overall, the study showed there was a change in sleep-quality and quality-of-life scores of “about 10% in each.”
“This, on the surface, would seem to be a meaningful change,” although it is less clear whether it is “clinically meaningful.” Perhaps it is, “but it would be nice to have more information.”
It would be useful, he said, to “show the means for each group pre- to postintervention, along with standard deviations,” he added.
Haeffel added that on the basis of current results, it isn’t possible to determine whether individuals’ control over music choice is important.
“We have no idea if ‘choice’ or length of playlist had any causal role in the results. One would need to run a study with the same playlist, but in one group people have to listen to whatever song comes on vs another condition in which they get to choose a song off the same list,” he said.
He noted that his group conducted a study in which highly popular music that was chosen by individual participants was found to have a positive effect. Even so, he said, “we could not determine if it was ‘choice’ or ‘popularity’ that caused the positive effects of music.”
In addition, he said, the reason music has a positive effect on insomnia remains unclear.
“It is not because it helped with depression, and it’s not because it’s actually changing objective sleep parameters. It could be that it improves mood right before bed or helps distract people right before bed. At the same time, it could also just be a placebo effect,” said Haeffel.
In addition, he said, it’s important to note that the music intervention had no comparator, so “maybe just doing something different or getting to talk with researchers created the effect and has nothing to do with music.”
Overall, he believes that there are “not enough data” to use the sleep intervention that was employed in the current study “as primary intervention, but future work could show its usefulness as a supplement.”
Lund and Bertelsen report ownership and sales of the MusicStar app. Haeffel reports no relevant financial relationships.
European Psychiatric Association (EPA) 2023 Congress: Abstract EPP0182. Presented March 26, 2023.
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