Biomechanical effect of music and dance on postural control among breast cancer survivors with neuropathy.

Research Objectives: To elucidate the effect of music listening on neuromotor control among breast cancer (BC) survivors with neuropathy, before and after movement-to-music (dance) training.

Design: Within-subject uncontrolled intervention pilot

Setting: Oncology outpatient (recruitment); community (intervention)

Participants: Eight breast cancer survivors with neuropathy and balance deficits.

Interventions: AdapTango dance (Hackney (2010); Worthen-Chaudhari (2019)) performed 2x per week for 8 weeks. Approximately 15 min movement-to-music dose per session.

Main Outcome Measures: Center-of-pressure (COP) measures of (1) medial-lateral variability (RMSx) and (2) velocity (Velx) (Worthen-Chaudhari, 2018) and (3) complexity per Roerdink (2011).

Results: During both baseline and intervention periods, listening to music reduced the velocity of medial-lateral postural sway (Velx). With dance training, a small but discernible positive effect size of listening to music emerged for sway complexity and variability behavior as well (d=0.14, both variables).

Conclusions: Simply listening to music has some effect on postural sway among BC survivors with neuropathy. Dance training may strengthen this effect.

Author(s) Disclosures: The authors have nothing to disclose. This research was supported by NIH 1R21AG068831-01A1.