Patients who are about to undergo eye surgery may benefit from listening to relaxing music just before the operation, a new study says. Not only does it help them feel less anxious, but it also allows them go through the procedure with minimal sedation.

Undergoing eye surgery while staying awake can be a very stressful ordeal for patients. Researchers at the Cochin University Hospital in France sought out a way to help these individuals become less anxious and minimize their need for sedation. This led them to examine the impact of music, which has long been known to provide such effects on surgery patients.

In a study presented during this year's Euroanaesthesia conference in London in the United Kingdom, Dr. Gilles Guerrier and his colleagues described how exposing eye surgery patients to relaxing music helped improve their vitality going into the procedure.

For the experiment, the researchers assigned 62 cataract surgery patients into two groups where they will either be allowed to listen to relaxing music through headphones for 15 minutes or listen to no music at all just before they undergo the operation. All of the participants underwent the same type of eye surgery to help make the results more comparable.

The type of music the participants listened to was composed specifically to help ease their anxiety. The tracks were recorded using instrumental pieces, which decrease in tempo as the music progressed. The number of instruments used also decreased the longer the tracks were played.

Each participant was allowed to choose music from 16 different recording styles to match their personal preferences. The selection of music featured styles such as classical, piano, Cuban, flamenco and jazz.

Guerrier and his team used a surgical fear questionnaire (SFQ) in order to assess the participants' anxiety levels before and after they listened to relaxing music. They also asked the patients to answer a standardized questionnaire to find out their overall satisfaction following the eye surgery.

The researchers found that anxiety levels of patients who belonged to the music group significantly dropped, with a score of 23 out of 100. By comparison, those who belonged to the non-music group gave the session a score of 65 out of 100 based on the questionnaire.

Patients in the music group also required minimal sedation during the eye surgery compared to those in the non-music group. They also gave the procedure a higher satisfaction score than those who weren't allowed to listen to music before the operation.

Guerrier said music listening can serve as an inexpensive and non-invasive way to lower anxiety levels of surgery patients in place of using anesthesia.

He and his colleagues are now planning to determine the impact of music listening in patients who are about to undergo other types of medical procedures such as in orthopedics, which often requires the use of regional anesthesia.

The researchers are also looking to find out if this form of music-induced relaxation can also help reduce the amount of pain that patients typically experience following a major surgery.