Review: The effectiveness of musical therapy in improving depression and anxiety symptoms among children and adolescents – a systematic review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Depression and anxiety disorders are considered to be among the greatest burdens of disease in children and adolescents. Recent literature has reported music therapy to be a safe and potentially effective intervention for the treatment of depression and anxiety. This systematic review examined the effectiveness of music therapy in reducing the symptom severity of depression and/or anxiety among children and adolescents. METHODS: Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) were obtained from a systematic search of nine major English databases from inception to January 2021. Studies were categorized by outcome, music therapy technique and follow-up period. RESULTS: Seven RCTs (n = 589) were included. Four RCTs had some concern of bias, while three had high risk of bias. Statistical pooling was not appropriate due to clinical heterogeneity. Four studies (n = 428) favoured music therapy for improvement of depressive symptoms at short- and intermediate-term follow-ups compared to control. One study (n = 106) favoured music therapy for improvement of anxiety symptoms at short-term follow-up compared to control. No studies favoured any control over music therapy for symptom improvement of depression and/or anxiety. CONCLUSION: Limited evidence suggests music therapy is an effective treatment for improving depression and/or anxiety symptom severity in children and adolescents. More high-quality RCTs are needed to address methodological flaws of current studies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".