Premature triadic music therapy (PT-MT) for babies and their parents: A pilot study.

Background: In literature, there are studies supporting the effectiveness of Music Therapy for many psychological disorders. This pilot study aims to introduce and test the effectiveness of Premature Triadic Creative Music Therapy (PT-CMT), which is an adaptation of Haslbeck’s Creative Music Therapy (CMT; 2013, 2014) to the triad (i.e., child, mother, and father) in the pre-term birth department. Methods: We recruited 6 preterm children and their parents, and they participated to the PT-CMT intervention, while some distress’ quantitative indicators have been measured for both children and parents. For children, we measured heart rate, blood perfusion, and blood saturation at three times (pre-PT-CMT, during PT-CMT, after PT-CMT). Parents filled instead the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS) at two times (pre-PT-CMT and post-PT-CMT). Results: Through Wilcoxon tests, Mann-Whitney tests and Kendall’s tau correlations, we found a statistically significant lower heart rate and a marginally statistically significant higher blood perfusion during PT-CMT (as compared to the baseline), even if these changes are not maintained at the end of PT-CMT. Concerning parents, EPDS scores are not statistically significant lower at the post-test; though, the Medians show a decrease of the scores. Limitations: The number of PT-CMT sessions is low and parents did not participate to all the sessions. Conclusions: We suggest that PT-CMT is a promising intervention for the reduction of distress in both parents and children. Though, further studies are needed in order to address this topic, possibly including a higher number of PT-CMT sessions and a higher number of participants.