That music may act on feelings, anxiety and concentration has been demonstrated by several scientific studies. However, its role on heart hasn’t been clarified and still now the researches are inconsistent. A few months ago instead a study has been presented at the congress of the European Society of Cardiology, which was held in Munich, the study in particular was able to show the beneficial effect of relaxing music on the health of the cardiovascular system.
Dr Naresh Sen, Consultant Cardiologist at HG SMS Hospital, Jaipur, India, and his team studied the effect of music on a sample of 149 participants, all in good health, and with an average age of 26. Participants were asked to listen, before going to bed, to relaxing music, that played during yoga lessons, the next day they had to listen to pop music and the third day there wasn’t played any music. The scientists were interested in the heart rate. In particular, the rate of heart is the result of the action of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, that together comprise the autonomic nervous system, one acts by calming the rate and the other one by increasing it. The ability of the heart to adapt itself to different situations means a higher variability of heart rate and a more adaptive autonomic nervous system, and this condition is considered protective on the cardiovascular system. On the contrary, a heart that shows, regardless of what happens, a low variability has also a higher risk of developing illnesses, the research indeed reports that low heart rate variability is associated with a 32-45% higher risk of a cardiovascular event. In view of these considerations, dr Naresh Sen observed that yoga music produces an increase in heart rate variability, pop music an important decrease and with no music there aren’t changes at all. Moreover, yoga music helps also to decrease anxiety, that on the contrary increases with pop music and even with no music sessions. For this reason, listening to yoga music may have a protective role on heart. Other researches on a larger sample are required, but this study paves the way for a really promising preventive and healing system where alternative, beneficial and also cheaper methods are used together with traditional medicine.
