Recent and ongoing research suggests exciting possibilities for the therapeutic use of art to improve the health and well-being of older adults. As this population grows in number and as a proportion of all Americans, it will experience dramatic increases in the number of people with aging-related health conditions, including cognitive decline and dementia. Given the arts’ potential to treat, prevent, or ameliorate those conditions, additional research is needed to clarify the relationship between the arts and the health and well-being of older adults. As part of a Federal Interagency Task Force on the Arts and Human Development, the National Endowment for the Arts and three units within the National Institutes of Health (NIH)-the National Institute on Aging (NIA), the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR), and the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM)-joined in requesting the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to convene a public workshop around this research need. The NAS workshop subsequently aimed to identify research gaps and opportunities to foster greater investment in promising arts-related research that can seed interventions to improve quality of life for older adults.
Health/Medical
Directory of Creative Aging Programs in America
NCCA has launched the first of its kind Directory funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, MetLife Foundation, and The Michelson Foundation. The Directory features arts programs serving older people and includes intergenerational activities in urban, suburban, and rural communities in a variety of settings such as community centers, senior centers, assisted living, adult day care, arts institutions, and libraries.
It is also searchable by an assortment of options such as: location, arts discipline, program setting, and adaptive design, with the goal of enabling older adults to find programs, encouraging arts and aging organizations to find partners, and helping teaching artists to find employment with organizations committed to creative aging in their communities.
Every Artist Insured: Understanding the New Health Care Law
Since its inception, the Artists Health Insurance Resource Center (AHIRC) has had a single mission: to help all artists in this country get quality affordable insurance for themselves and their families. “This booklet is a clear explanation in a simple question and answer format of the most significant programs and reforms within the law, with special emphasis on those that directly impact the lives of artists,” states the authors.
Arts Organizations and Public Health: Developing Relationships and Programs to Address Local Health Priorities
Over the course of seven years, Partners for Livable Communities collaborated with the Ford Foundation on an initiative known as Shifting Sands: Arts, Culture and Neighborhood Change. The core of this initiative was a collective of nine community-based arts and cultural institutions working to become more integrated with the community development issues in their immediate neighborhoods. This primer was designed for the arts organization that wishes to initiate programming focused on local health issues, or create partnerships with health groups in order to best meet the needs of the community. Best practices are included.
Musicians and their Health Care
With the spiraling costs of health care, the old adage, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” is more relevant than ever. And it’s especially true for musicians-“the elite athletes of the small muscles.” This report looks at ways musicians can stay healthy, as well as chapters on obtaining health care, doctors and related issues.
Short and Longer Term Effects of Musical Intervention in Severe Alzheimer’s Disease
Abstract:
The researchers examined short and longer term effects of musical and cooking interventions on emotional well-being of severe Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients. These two pleasurable activities (i.e., listening to music, tasting sweets) that were collectively performed (i.e., playing music together, collaborative preparation of a cake) were compared in two groups of matched patients with AD (N = 14). Each intervention lasted four weeks (two sessions per week) and their effects were regularly assessed up to four weeks after the end of the intervention. We repeatedly evaluated the emotional state of both groups before, during, and after the intervention periods by analyzing discourse content and facial expressions from short filmed interviews as well as caregivers’ judgments of mood.
The results reveal short-term benefits of both music and cooking interventions on emotional state on all these measures, but long-term benefits were only evident after the music intervention. The present finding suggests that non-pharmacological approaches offer promising methods to improve the quality of life of patients with dementia and that music stimulation is particularly effective to produce long lasting effects on patients’ emotional well-being.
