Researching the Impact of Music Therapy for Newborns with Heart Defects

From 2023 to 2025, the Vontobel Foundation is supporting a research project led by Prof. Dr. med. Cornelia Franziska Hagmann, which is studying the effects of creative music therapy on children with congenital heart defects and on their parents.

Medical Research Project under the Leadership of Prof. Dr. med. Cornelia Franziska Hagmann, Head Physician of Intensive Care and Neonatology at the Children's Hospital Zurich, Professor of Neonatology at the University of Zurich

University research and education are an integral part of the Children's Hospital Zurich. They are internationally competitive at the highest level and lead to new scientific knowledge that is quickly made accessible to children and adolescents, ensuring their best possible care.

Congenital heart disease (CHD) is the most common birth defect, affecting 8 out of 1,000 live births. Thanks to advances in top-tier medicine, affected children can undergo surgery, but they often experience impairments in various areas of development later in their lives; impairments in cognitive development, for example, play a significant role in their educational trajectory and career success. Additionally, many parents feel a heavy burden when their child is suffering a severe illness, both during hospitalization and after discharge, and this can hinder healthy interaction with their child.

Creative music therapy, as a family-integrated intervention, provides positive, relaxing, and developmentally supportive auditory experiences and helps to shape the relationship between parents and child. This is intended to reduce the need for special medical care. However, solid evidence is still lacking on the effects of non-pharmacological interventions on high-risk preterm infants, such as infants with CHD, and their parents.

The research project "BOND-Creative Music Therapy in Newborn Infants with Congenital Heart Disease" addresses this gap and examines the effects of creative music therapy on parent-child bonding, parental well-being, and the neurological development of children with CHD in a randomized clinical trial (NCT05702203) at the Children's Hospital Zurich.

The study is based on previous results of creative music therapy and the psychological health of parents, conducted by the research team. These studies had shown that music therapy is a promising non-pharmacological intervention to alleviate maternal anxiety and support the physiological stability (heart rate, respiratory rate, feeding) of preterm infants. It was demonstrated that creative music therapy reduces parental anxiety and improves the functional connectivity of the brains of preterm infants.

The current research project expands on these findings and tests the hypothesis that creative music therapy can improve the interaction between parents and a child with a congenital heart defect at six months of age, the parents' mental health, and the child's development (brain connectivity and regulation ability).