It was a stroke that robbed Leonie Fitzgerald of her words. Left with a skeleton vocabulary of just four or five words, her ability to communicate and interact became severely limited. Her stroke also saw her diagnosed with dementia. But music has reinstated her ability to express herself - and even learn a thing or two along the way.
Conventional wisdom has it that people with dementia can't learn new things. But results of a Melbourne University pilot program encouraging patients with early and mid-stage dementia to write their own song lyrics suggests otherwise.
![Professor Felicity Baker rehearsing with dementia patient Leonie Fitzgerald, 77.](/web/20161115042930im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/m/9/2/8/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gsm4r5.png/1478756462998.jpg)
Ms Fitzgerald, 77, was among a group of eight dementia patients at the Caladenia Dementia Care Centre in Mooroolbark who took part in weekly songwriting therapy sessions with music therapy researcher Felicity Baker.
Over 10 weeks they wrote seven songs as a group and even recorded them on a CD.
![Music therapy researcher Felicity Baker will travel to Germany to expand her research on songwriting for people with ...](/web/20161115042930im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/m/9/1/v/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gsm4r5.png/1478756462998.jpg)
Unexpectedly, the results showed people with dementia can learn new things.
"We found that some of the people in the group were remembering the lyrics of their own songs from the previous week," Professor Baker said. "This is something completely new."
Manager of the dementia care centre Sarah Yeates said she took great pleasure watching as Ms Fitzgerald tapped her feet along to the music, enjoying the melody.
"Music is something that she can enjoy without having to rely on her limited communication skills," she said. "During the sessions she was laughing, smiling and tapping."
Charged with writing songs together, the group also had to collaborate and discuss how the lyrics would be formed.
"That gave them a sense of ownership and the satisfaction of creating something, which is often taken away from people with dementia," Ms Yeates said.
She said a sense of contributing generated a much needed injection of self-worth, which family members noticed in their more talkative, confident relative.
Most noticeably though the songs became familiar - evidence that the dementia patients were remembering what was learned previously.
"One of the things that everybody thinks they know about dementia is that people with dementia can't learn anything new," she said. "But we watched these people learn the songs, and the words. You could see the songs were familiar, once the first couple of chords were played."
On Friday the program was one of 72 research projects Universities Australia announced would share in $2.5 million of funding as part of a program designed to increase collaboration between researchers in Australia and Germany.
Professor Baker's songwriting project, which also worked with carers, was awarded $24,000. This will allow her to expand the program in Melbourne as well as replicate it in Germany, where she is keen to establish if there are any cross-cultural differences.
"We need to do a lot more to substantiate [what we found] and to see if this was something that just happened in this group or if it occurs more broadly," Professor Baker said. "That's why we need to go on with more research."