Browsing by Author "Jokinen, Jade"

Objectives. Prenatal depression is one of the most common mental disorders during pregnancy. It not only causes notable distress to the mother but also to the rest of the family. When choosing treatment, the well-being of the fetus should also be taken into consideration. Music has been proven to have benefits as a treatment method but not any notable adverse effects. This suggests that it could be a practical treatment method in treating prenatal depression. The aim of this review is to find out whether music interventions could be effective methods to treat prenatal depression. In addition, it is examined how these music interventions have been carried out and what could be their possible contributing factors. Methods. The literary research was done on PubMed database. The words used for title and abstract were “depress*” and “music” and “antenatal” or “antepartum” or “prenatal”. In addition, the references of the found meta-analyses and reviews were scoped. All studies included had to be based on a randomized controlled trial. Five research papers were selected into this review. All the subjects were pregnant women who volunteered to participate in the studies. Results and conclusions. The reviewed studies in this review suggest that music interventions can reduce the amount of depression symptoms on pregnant women. The studies found for this review carried out music interventions as music interventions that were focused on listening to music and as music interventions that were focused on singing. However, this review cannot answer which one of these interventions is more effective in the treatment of prenatal depression. Possible mechanisms of action could be related to adding enjoyable action to one’s daily life that aid relaxation. However, there is not a lot of research literature concerning the subject, and, in the future, it is relevant that there would be studies comparing different music-interventions on pregnant women. This is of essence because music interventions could have efficient and cost-effective usage in the future for the treatment of prenatal depression.