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Classical Music Relaxes Cats During Surgery

A little Handel goes a long way.
​Cat roadie. Image: Pixabay.

​From Keyboard Cat to the musical Cats, tune-loving felines are a staple of popular culture. But according to new research from the University of Lisbon, music is more than just a source of entertainment for cats—it could also be an anesthetic.

"There are several studies in humans—adults and children—stating that music has beneficial effects for patients with pain," Miguel Carreira, a veterinary surgeon and professor at the University of Lisbon, told me over email. "The addition of non-pharmacological agents, such as music, becomes […] very important in the medical and surgical scenario."

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Carreira wanted to find out if cats undergoing surgery would experience the same benefits from musical therapy as humans do, so he assembled a team of veterinarians to tackle the question. The result, published this week in the Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery, may well be the most adorable medical study in history.

The team put headphones on 12 female cats undergoing elective ovariohysterectomies (the medical term for getting spayed). The team placed headphones over each cat's ears during the operation, and piped in two minute excerpts of three songs from vastly different genres: "Adagio For Strings (Opus 11)" by Samuel Barber, "Torn" by Natalie Imbruglia, and "Thunderstruck" by AC/DC.

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By monitoring the respiratory rate and pupillary diameter of the anesthetized cats, Carreira and his colleagues could make assumptions about their stress levels. Not surprisingly, the banshee screams of Brian Johnson stressed the cats out, while the calm classical stylings of Barber soothed them. It seems they were just kind of "meh" about Imbruglia.

"Considering that music is a complex concept which presents a variable nature and blurry limits," said Carreira, "variants like beats per minute, rhythm, or harmony—that were not assessed in this study due its exploratory nature—may be useful to understand why do cats may preferred certain music genres and composers over others."

"What is proven is that as the brain interprets and processes musical stimuli, a series of successive biochemical reactions and mechanisms are activated inducing different responses in body," he added.

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In case you suspect that noise levels alone might have been responsible for the cats' preferences, it's worth noting that Carreira's team was careful to keep the decibel range consistent.

"The final volume that each patient was exposed to was always uniform, and less than 80 decibels," he told me. "In the study, the final mp3 player decibel output delivered by the device to the patient throughout the headphones were measured and confirmed by using a Digital Sound Noise Level Meter device, in order to guarantee that the final value was less than 80 decibels for the three music genres."

The study suggests that certain genres of music could play an important role in soothing animals when they visit the vet. This approach could lead to a reduction in the amount of anesthetic necessary for surgery, which would accordingly reduce the side effects of pharmacological sedation.

Moving forward, Carreira would like to try out this approach with other animals, and ultimately perform MRIs and electroencephalographic analysis on his patients. "In the future we [want to continue] the study [with] dogs, using cortisol, catecholamines, and blood glucose as new parameters for measurement," he said. "These techniques would be very useful in the development of the future investigation."

It will be interesting to see if other animals share the cats' classical taste, or if there will be any metalhead pets out there. Maybe dogs will be really into Snoop Dogg, while rodent pets unwind by listening to Modest Mouse's greatest hits. Whatever the outcome, the idea of conked out animals listening to tunes for science is compelling enough on its own.