Project title
Description of initiative
Association for therapeutic tango in Asturias is a group of professionals who use Argentine tango as a tool to promote physical and mental health. They focus on the particularities offered by this music and this dance to work on three different levels: physical, social and emotional. They have already started working with people with Parkinson's but they want to reach more people and they want to do it professionally.
Themes: Culture and...
Keywords
Target group
Cultural field
Timeframe
Results, benefits, impact and lessons learnt
Parkinson's disease is one of the most frequent chronic neurodegenerative disorders in the elderly population. In addition to presenting motor symptoms, the
patients also show cognitive and emotional alterations that affect their quality of life. Although pharmacological treatment is the most used procedure to reduce motor
symptoms, new alternatives have been proposed such as music therapy and dance for these patients as complementary interventions to pharmacological treatment, also
showing beneficial effects on cognitive and emotional symptoms.
In this study, an intervention based on the Argentine tango was performed with ten patients with Parkinson's disease, aged between 64 and 78 years. This program was developed
with a weekly Argentine tango session (of one hour). The duration of the program was seven months and was taught in the Parkinson Asturias Association, Oviedo. Patients were evaluated with the Cognitive Reserve Scale, Tapping task and the attention test d2. The patients showed an improvement in the tapping task and maintenance of the attention levels during the program. Therefore, this intervention proposal can be useful and beneficial for the case of Parkinson's patients.