Are culturally vibrant communities healthier? Relationships between performing arts activity and health outcomes in the 500 largest US cities.

AIMS: Recent reviews have demonstrated broad links between performing arts participation (e.g. music-making; dancing; acting) and receptive engagement (e.g. listening to music; attending a dance/theatre performance) and improved health, including reduced disease and mortality risk. However, no investigations to date have interrogated the links between community-level performing arts activity (i.e. participation + receptive engagement) and health outcomes - that is, do the performing arts help create healthy communities? This study aims to address this question by examining links between performing arts activity and health outcomes across 500 cities in the US. METHODS: Secondary analysis of demographic, health outcome, performing arts activity (estimated by annual performing arts revenue), and preventive/unhealthy behaviour data for 500 large cities in the US - data extracted from the US Centers for Disease Control 500 Cities Project, Dun & Bradstreet Hoovers Database, and US Census. Links between performing arts activity and 12 health/disease outcomes were evaluated using a series of hierarchical beta regression models which progressively controlled for demographic variables and preventive/unhealthy behaviour prevalence. RESULTS: The 500 analysed US cities comprise 33.4% of the total US population and 84,010 performing arts businesses (total annual revenue $27.84 billion). No significant associations were found between performing arts activity and 9 of 12 health outcomes in fully adjusted models (p ⩾ .17). Statistically significant relationships (p < .01) between increased performing arts activity and increased prevalence of chronic kidney disease, coronary heart disease, and stroke were determined to be clinically equivocal. CONCLUSIONS: This study contributes to a growing body of conflicting epidemiologic evidence regarding the impact of the performing arts on health/disease and mortality outcomes, evaluated using a range of disparate methodologies. A consensus, psychometrically rigorous approach is required to address this prevailing uncertainty in future epidemiologic studies examining the effects of performing arts activities both within and across countries and communities.

Sensory feedback - Dependent neural de-orchestration: The effect of altered sensory feedback on Musician's Dystonia.

PURPOSE: Musician's dystonia (MD) is a task-specific movement disorder related to extensive expert music performance training. Similar to other forms of focal dystonia, MD involves sensory deficits and abnormal patterns of sensorimotor integration. The present study investigated the impaired cortical sensorimotor network of pianists who suffer from MD by employing altered auditory and tactile feedback during scale playing with multichannel EEG. METHODS: 9 healthy professional pianists and 9 professional pianists suffering from right hand MD participated in an experiment that required repeated scale playing on a MIDI piano under altered sensory feedback while EEG was measured. RESULTS: The comparison of EEG data in healthy pianists and pianists suffering from MD revealed a higher degree of inter-regional phase synchronisation between the frontal and parietal regions and between the temporal and central regions in the patient group and in conditions that are relevant to the long-trained auditory-motor coupling (normal auditory feedback and complete deprivation of auditory feedback), but such abnormalities decreased in conditions with delayed auditory feedback and altered tactile feedback. CONCLUSIONS: These findings support the hypothesis that the impaired sensorimotor integration of MD patients is specific to the type of overtrained task that the patients were trained for and can be modified with altered sensory feedback.