[Music therapy as a non-pharmacological treatment in Alzheimer's disease. A systematic review].

INTRODUCTION: Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease which involves, among other manifestations, a progressive deterioration of memory and language, as well as behavioral disorders. In addition to non-curative pharmacological therapies, for the last years, music therapy has been developed as an effective non-pharmacological therapy in order to relieve many of these manifestations.

AIM: To analyze the recent scientific evidence about the effect of music therapy on cognitive and behavioral symptoms in patients with AD.

PATIENTS AND METHODS: A systematic review has been carried out by means of a bibliographical research using the database PubMed and Science Direct. The key words used for this search were 'Alzheimer's disease' and 'music therapy', as well as the boolean operator 'AND'. We selected those publications between January 2006 and December 2016 and after inclusion criteria, 21 publications were selected.

RESULTS: This systematic review has demonstrated the beneficial impact of music therapy on cognition (memory, attention, language), emotion and behavior (anxiety, depression and agitation) in AD patients.

CONCLUSIONS: Music therapy constitutes a non-pharmacological therapy effective for some cognitive, emotional and behavioral symptoms in patients with AD. However, further investigations and more evidence in this field are needed to claim conclusively the impact of music therapy on this disease.