Efficacy of five-element music interventions in perinatal mental health and labor pain: A meta-analysis

To systematically review the efficacy of five-element music interventions in perinatal mental health and labor pain. To provide evidence for future research on Chinese Traditional Music Interventions.

An electronically search was conducted in Web of Science, PubMed, EMbase, The Cochrane Library, CNKI databases, WanFang Data and VIP Database for Chinese Technical Periodicals from inception to January 07, 2020 to collect randomized controlled trials (RCTs) on five-element music interventions for prenatal, perinatal and postpartum women. Literature screening, data extraction, and the risk of bias assessment of all eligible studies were conducted by two reviewers independently. Then, meta-analysis was performed by RevMan 5.3 software.

A total of 13 RCTs involving 2387 patients were included. The results of meta-analysis showed that five-element music could significantly improve the depression levels (SMD = -2.03, 95%CI: -2.88 to -1.19, P < 0.00001), anxiety levels (SMD = -3.49, 95%CI: -4.47 to -2.24, P < 0.00001) and severe anxiety rate (OR = 0.42, 95%CI: 0.19 to 0.94, P = 0.04) of perinatal women. Additionally, five-element music produced significant effects on labor pain (MD = -0.67, 95%CI: -0.82 to -0.52, P < 0.00001), labor duration (MD = -0.85, 95%CI: -1.07 to -0.63, P < 0.00001), the hemorrhage 2 h after parturition (MD = -19.55, 95%CI: -35.56 to -3.54, P = 0.02) and the Serum DYN expression level (MD = 1.32, 95%CI: 0.23 to 2.40, P = 0.02).

Five-element music may be efficacious in improving perinatal women' depression, anxiety, labor pain, labor duration, the hemorrhage 2 h after parturition and the Serum DYN expression level. Because of the limitation of quantity and quality of included studies, more high-quality studies were needed to confirm the above conclusion.