Editorial on randomized trials reveals reduced anxiety and heart rate during imaging, highlighting that music should complement rather than replace anxiety triage.
To the Editor, Li and colleagues' [1] meta-analysis of nine randomized trials suggests that music during large medical imaging examinations can reduce heart rate and anxiety and improve cooperation, while pooled depression outcomes were not significantly changed.This low-burden intervention is appealing, but substantial heterogeneity in several outcomes means that music should complement, not replace, brief anxiety triage.
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Cheng et al. (2026) studied this question.
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