Prof. Dr. med. Gennadij M. Butenko

“Emo­tional stress and psycho­logi­cal disa­dap­ta­tion, which lead to neu­rotic dis­or­ders and which must be clini­cally treated, are com­mon to many ill­nesses and rep­re­sent a se­ri­ous prob­lem in mod­ern so­ci­ety and medi­cine.

If we learn more about the role of this kind of emo­tional stress in the net­work of clini­cal-bio­logi­cal re­la­tion­ships, it could form an im­por­tant basis for the treat­ment of many ill­nesses. As such, an ideal com­bi­na­tion of medi­cal and men­tal treat­ment is very prom­is­ing. Among the vari­ous psy­cho­so­matic meth­ods, Medi­cal Reso­nance Ther­apy Mu­sic^® caught our par­ticu­lar at­ten­tion.

As a re­sult, we car­ried out a se­ries of pilot stud­ies at our In­sti­tute for Ger­on­tol­ogy in Kiev, in or­der to de­ter­mine the in­flu­ence of the mu­si­colo­gist and clas­si­cal com­poser Peter Hübner’s Medi­cal Reso­nance Ther­apy Mu­sic^® on vari­ous pa­rame­ters, such as:

1. blood pressure
2. reactive fear
3. auditory and visual
   
4. short-term memory
5. psychomotoric speed
6. attentiveness
7. concentration powers
8. visual-motoric co-ordination
9. learning capability
10. reaction speed

The stud­ies were car­ried out on mid­dle-aged and older peo­ple who were suf­fer­ing from athero­scle­rotic en­cepha­lo­pa­thy.

In this group we saw a bene­fi­cial ef­fect of Medi­cal Reso­nance Ther­apy Mu­sic^® on the func­tional status of the cen­tral nerv­ous sys­tem (please see the in­di­vid­ual re­sults of the stud­ies – “The ef­fects of Medi­cal Reso­nance Ther­apy Mu­sic^® on older peo­ple and mid­dle-aged peo­ple with athero­scle­rotic en­cepha­lo­pa­thy” avail­able from AAR EDI­TION), and the bene­fi­cial ef­fect mani­fested both as a relaxation and as an ac­ti­va­tion.

The fol­low­ing con­sid­era­tions form the theo­reti­cal basis for our con­tinu­ing re­search: in the course of his life, a per­son meets nu­mer­ous con­flict situa­tions which lead to dis­har­mony and stress and which are ac­com­panied by the chronic ir­ri­ta­tion of vari­ous sec­tions of the nerv­ous sys­tem and the dis­rup­tion of the so­matic proc­esses.

One of the most se­ri­ous of these health-threat­en­ing dis­or­ders is the change in the cir­cu­la­tory sys­tem, which mani­fests it­self in an in­crease in ar­te­rial blood pres­sure. How­ever, in the course of evo­lu­tion, a de­fence sys­tem has de­vel­oped which pro­tects peo­ple from stress dam­age. Here, it is the opioid-pep­tide sys­tem in par­ticu­lar, which is able to limit the ex­tent of a stress re­ac­tion.

We as­sume that Medi­cal Reso­nance Ther­apy Mu­sic^® in­flu­ences these psycho-emo­tional ar­eas of the brain which are re­spon­si­ble for stress-re­liev­ing proc­esses. Nowa­days it is as­sumed that, on a physio­logi­cal level, such ef­fects are con­veyed via the hor­mones and trans­mit­ters at­trib­uted to the neu­ro­en­do­crine im­mune cycle: opioids, pep­tides, stress-re­lated hor­mones (ACTH, cor­ti­cos­ter­oides), in­ter­leukins.

There­fore, in our fu­ture re­search with Medi­cal Reso­nance Ther­apy Mu­sic^® we will study the psycho-emo­tional status, the cir­cu­la­tory sys­tem and the hor­mone lev­els.

We would thus like to find out more about the ex­tent to which Medi­cal Reso­nance Ther­apy Mu­sic^® might be a use­ful tool for al­le­vi­at­ing the ef­fects of stress and high blood pres­sure in older peo­ple and mid­dle-aged peo­ple.”