Promoting Psychological and Health Status of the Elderly: The Underlying Mechanisms of Chin-Don Therapy

Hatta; Kanji

Department of Psychiatric Medicine, School of Nursing, Takarazuka University, Osaka, Japan (k-hatta@takara-univ.ac.jp)

Chin-Don (CD) performance – a kind of musical performance for common people in Japan during the Edo Period – has been proven useful for healthcare promotion and healing, and was therefore employed as CD therapy (CDT) in a series of studies. Since CDT induces favorable outcomes in three elderly subjects, we further investigated the benefits of CDT in promoting quality-of-life in the cognitively impaired elderly using objective approaches: i) measuring salivary cortisol and immunoglobulin-A; ii) self-assessment of mood, emotion, and behavior using a face-scale; (iii) monitoring blood levels of neurotransmitters such as adrenalin (AD), noradrenalin (NA), and dopamine (DP) as well as the stress-related hormone cortisol (CT) and β-endorphin (BE); and (iv) monitoring stress-related CT, as well as immunodefense system-related BE and natural killer (NK) cell activity. Our studies focus on endogenous factors closely related to humor, laughter, stress, emotion, depression, joy, movement, and other apparent physiological responses such as being more alert and aroused (such as AD, NA, CT, BE). CDT works effectively in improving mood (emotional and psychological states) for the elderly. The significant blood CT level decreases in CDT patents may have due to less stress during CDT exposure, as CT is associated with elevated stress input. We did not measure the effect of immunity by CT decrease, as the effect would be transient and short-lived. Of the local vs global categories of BE function, the latter function is more relevant with CDT in decreasing bodily stress and maintaining homeostasis (e.g. in pain management, reward effects, and behavioral stability), providing enthusiastic participation and satisfactory post-event emotions and/or behavior in the CD-induced dancing. All in all, CDT induces favorable de-stressing effects, euphoric reliefs, reduction in pain and/or physical handicaps experienced by the elderly participants. These favorable psychological and physiological responses could be explained via relevant objective monitoring of blood indexes (although more endogenous factors need to be monitored), thus advocating the useful effects of CDT.

Keywords: CDT, Chin-Don therapy, Quality of Life, QoL, elderly, psychological health of elderly.