Therapeutic touch and music improve sleep quality, quality of life, symptoms in menopause

Key takeaways:

• Therapeutic touch and music therapy are complementary and alternative medicine methods growing in popularity.
• These methods were linked to improved sleep quality, quality of life and other symptoms in menopause.

Among menopausal women, therapeutic touch and music therapy were associated with improved sleep quality, quality of life, and somatic, psychological and urogenital symptoms of menopause after 4 weeks, researchers reported.

Therapeutic touch and music therapy are two complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) methods that have previously been shown to alleviate pain, anxiety and depression while improving relaxation, well-being and quality of life, they wrote in Menopause.

“Therapeutic touch is a noninvasive nursing intervention that directs life energy to patients and balances it, and the flow of energy increases the overall energy, removes blockages and creates an environment that promotes the acceleration of the natural healing process to alleviate ailments or symptoms caused by imbalances and blockages in life energy fields,” Fatima Keskin Töre, PhD, from the department of obstetrics and gynecology nursing at Kahramanmaras Sutcu Imam University, Turkey, and colleagues wrote.

Keskin Töre and colleagues conducted a study in an experimental model with a pretest, posttest and control group to evaluate the effects of therapeutic touch and music on sleep quality, menopause symptoms and quality of life in 108 menopausal women. Researchers collected data using a Participant Information Form; the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI), which assesses subjective sleep quality, sleep latency, sleep duration, habitual sleep efficiency, sleep disturbance, sleep medication use, and daytime dysfunction; the Menopause Rating Scale (MRS), which assesses somatic complaints, psychological complaints, and urogenital symptoms; and the Menopause-Specific Quality of Life Scale (MSQLS), which includes vasomotor domain, psychosocial domain, physical domain, and sexual domain. All participants were randomly assigned to the therapeutic touch group (n = 36), the music group (n = 36) or the control group (n =36).

In the therapeutic touch group, participants received therapeutic touch once weekly for 4 weeks for 15 minutes in a private room. The music therapy group received relaxing music copied to their mobile phones and were directed to listen to the track for 30 minutes before bed daily for 4 weeks, with reminders sent once weekly to motivate participants to comply. Finally, the control group did not receive either intervention, and, after the posttest data were collected, this group received the music track on their phones and had therapeutic touch applied twice.

Compared with the control group, when adjusting for the effect of pretest scores, researchers observed lower posttest PSQI scores indicating less dysfunction in the therapeutic touch and music therapy groups for subjective sleep quality (1.53 vs. 0.72 and 1.06), sleep latency (1.58 vs. 1.06 and 1.14) and sleep disturbances (1.42 vs. 1.19 and 1.31), respectively.

Similarly, when adjusting for the effect of pretest scores, participants in the therapeutic touch and music therapy groups had lower posttest MRS (13.53 and 13.19 vs. 18.19) and MSQLS (47.14 and 42.86 vs. 70.86) scores indicating less severe symptoms and better quality of life compared with the control group, respectively.

According to the researchers, utilization of CAM is increasing due to high rates of potential adverse events of drug or hormonal therapy treatments.

“Nurses working in the field of obstetrics and gynecology should consider including therapeutic touch and music practices in the nursing care of women with menopausal complaints and those with low sleep quality and poor menopause-related quality of life,” the researchers wrote. “Specialized nurses should be trained in this field to integrate therapeutic touch practices into nursing care.”