PhD defence P.R. (Pablo) Kappen

Below is a brief summary about the dissertation:

This thesis studies the effect of music and musicality during brain surgery. The first part of this study assesses the possible preventive effect of music on delirium after brain surgery. First, we describe the definition of delirium in the neurosurgical literature, as delirium is a difficult and under-exposed topic in neurosurgical literature. We summarize and quantify the methods of diagnosis, discuss the factors contributing to delirium and the impact for the neurosurgical patients’ recovery. As listening to recorded music has been proven to lower delirium-eliciting factors in the surgical population, such as anxiety, pain and stress, we were interested in the size of analgesic effect and its underlying mechanism before applying this into our clinical setting. We therefore describe the results of music on pain in an experimental randomized controlled trial in healthy volunteers. This part of the thesis is concluded by a randomized controlled trial assessing the preventive effect of music on delirium after brain surgery.

In the second part of this thesis the focus swifts towards maintaining musicality and language functions around awake craniotomy. Intra-operative mapping of language does not ensure complete maintenance with often temporary deteriorating language functions after tumor resection. We evaluate the effect of musicality on language recovery after awake glioma surgery in a cohort study. Moreover, whether it is feasible and what the additional value is of mapping musicality during awake craniotomy.