Durham, N.C. • A good set of headphones and a little Bach may ease the pain and anxiety of getting a prostate biopsy, according to a newly published study by Duke Cancer Institute researchers.
That could be music to the ears of the 700,000 or so American men who each year get the often-uncomfortable procedure, regarded as the only reliable diagnostic test for prostate cancer.
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The results of the study were published this month in the journal Urology.
Researchers enrolled 88 patients and randomly assigned each to one of three groups. One group wasn’t given headphones. Another got headphones that canceled noise but provided no music. The third wore headphones that played Bach concertos.
The subjects all received a type of biopsy involving an ultrasound probe and a spring-loaded needle that has a loud trigger. The noise alone often causes men to flinch as the needle trims off a tiny piece of their prostate, even if they report no pain.
Diastolic blood pressure — which can rise due to stress or anxiety — spiked among patients in the two groups that didn’t listen to music and remained elevated after the biopsies. Diastolic blood pressure was unaffected among the patients assigned to the group that got music. Also, via standardized questionnaires, they reported less pain.
About one in five men report high stress and anxiety about the procedure. Don Young, 57, of Durham, N.C., said he definitely would have been among them if he had not been one of the study subjects who got the music.
Young described himself as extremely apprehensive about getting the biopsy. And that was before he found himself face down in the required, vulnerable-feeling position as his health-care team set out 12 containers with the intent of clipping not one but a dozen tiny pieces of tissue from his prostate.
Then he got the Bach.
"The music, it actually took my mind somewhere else," he said. "It really calmed me, and before I knew it, the whole thing was over."
The Bach study was the brainchild of a group of medical students who received no outside funding for it. The researchers tried only the Baroque master rather than other genres, such as the Motown or rock that Young normally listens to. That might have helped, Young said, because he felt he had to really concentrate.
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