Music is an established form of therapy for people with dementia. Even if the disease has damaged the parts of the brain that process memories, a familiar song can still transport a distressed person back to an earlier time.
Joanne Ryan, an epidemiologist at Monash University in Melbourne, grew intrigued by the transcendent power of music after hearing from a local community member. “One of their parents had developed dementia but continued to be able to play the piano even though they were really struggling with a lot of things in their everyday life,” she told Being Patient.
If music is so helpful for people who already have dementia, Ryan wondered what it could do for someone who had yet to develop any symptoms. Perhaps engaging with music could be an effective strategy for delaying the disease.
Now, she has some evidence to support this theory. In a recently published study, Ryan and her colleagues showed that older adults who engaged with music on a regular basis had lower risk for dementia. However, she and others in the field still have a long way to go before they fully understand the connection between music and cognitive health.
Lower risk whether you listen or play
Ryan is part of a team running an ongoing study that regularly surveys thousands of Australian adults. All of the participants were 70 years or older when the study started a little over a decade ago. In year three, Ryan’s team began to ask them about their musical habits, giving the researchers seven years of responses to determine if there was an association between music engagement and dementia risk.
People who said they were always listening to music were 39 percent less likely to have developed dementia during that timespan than everyone else. They were also 17 percent less likely to have developed milder cognitive impairment, and they consistently scored better on cognitive and memory tests.
Ryan’s team also asked the study participants if and how often they played an instrument, and they found a similar result. People who were often or always playing instruments were 35 percent less likely to have developed dementia, and people who regularly both listened to and played music were 33 percent less likely.
“They’re all very similar,” said Ryan. “That was a little bit surprising for us that we didn’t see stronger” effects for people who played instruments or did both.
That stood out to Michael Hornberger, a dementia researcher at the University of Southampton, as well. In 2024, he wrote a piece for The Conversation about a then-new study that investigated the link between music engagement and cognition in people without dementia.
In that earlier study, people who played instruments performed better on cognitive tests, but there was no association between listening to music and cognitive function.
Hornberger cautioned that the two studies asked different questions. One looked at the link between music and dementia risk, and the other looked at the link between music and cognitive function. However, he still thought it was interesting that they ended with such different conclusions about the relative importance of playing music, rather than just listening to it.
Hornberger told Being Patient that he would like to see Ryan and others explore this question further. He noticed that the number of people who said they played an instrument in Ryan’s 2025 study was relatively small compared to the number of people who said they regularly listened to music. “So for me, I think the jury is still out,” he said.
For her part, Ryan wondered if the issue was that her study only included people who were already over 70. Presumably, the distinct cognitive benefit of playing an instrument that the 2024 study picked up on has something to do with the challenge of learning something new.
“But we don’t know if,” she said, “all of these people who were playing a musical instrument [in our study], they could have been playing most of their life.”
In other words, playing an instrument might no longer have been a cognitive challenge for them, and any unique effect it had on dementia risk may have grown too weak to pick up on. Consequently, Ryan’s team could only see the effect of music engagement in general.
Why music might be beneficial
Ryan and her team don’t know exactly why they found the associations that they did. The researchers also asked the study participants about their school history to see if differences in music engagement simply reflected differences in education.
Although engaging with music had a stronger effect on dementia risk for people who went to college, it was also associated with lower risk for the people in the study who completed the fewest years of education. Thus, even though education affected the link, it didn’t fully explain it.
Still, higher music engagement could reflect all sorts of things that have been associated with reduced dementia risk. Bill Thompson, a psychologist at Bond University who was not involved in the study, wrote to Being Patient, “It’s possible people who are already healthier, more educated, more socially engaged, more emotionally attuned, and have better ‘brains’ are just more likely to stay involved with music.”
After all, music isn’t just lyrics, melodies, and beats; it’s an experience that can tap into many of the most important parts of our lives. It can connect us to the past and to other people. It can move us both physically and emotionally.
All of this could make it extremely challenging to isolate and study the unique effects of music on brain health. It also suggests that the idea of trying to isolate music’s effect on the brain might not make any sense at all.
“Music might have some long-term benefits for cognition (and cognitive reserve) because of the ‘activities’ it promotes and the contexts in which it occurs,” Thompson wrote.
To really know if music itself has a unique effect on a person’s dementia risk, Ryan said follow-up experiments were needed. For instance, senior centers could host activities with and without music, and researchers could keep track of the participants to see if the ones who attended the activities with music ultimately prove less likely to develop dementia.
In the meantime, Ryan has started listening to music more often than she used to, and she thinks it makes sense for others to do so as well. It could be beneficial, but at the very least, it’s fun. Her main advice: “Listen to the music you enjoy.”
Rapid City New Horizons Band 
Leave a comment