Invited to join a research project, junior Iris Baydu helped write a paper for Oxford University about how music can be used as a type of therapy for those struggling with epigenetically-inherited Alzheimer’s.
“I was in an internship under Oxford University Scholastica,” Baydu said. “It was a four-week-long online internship that I signed up for because I was really interested in epigenetics, the study of how environmental factors can influence a person’s gene expression without changing their actual DNA. We were told to pick a topic on epigenetics and research it. My group, which consisted of different students from around the world, picked music.”
Epigenetics refers to how a person’s genes can be affected by someone’s behavior and environment. Not necessarily genetic mutations and changes, but how one behaves. It changes as a person ages throughout life and by their exposure to different environmental factors that happen over the course of their life, according to genomics.gov.
“I really wanted to do the effects of music on epigenetics while others in the group wanted to do something about music therapy,” Baydu said. “Then one of my group members suggested a real-world illness that has genetic roots: Alzheimer’s. We wrote about how music therapy can be used to help lessen the symptoms of Alzheimer’s that was epigenetically inherited as a form of treatment. The paper ended up being about 20 pages long.”Music can affect different parts of the brain that are linked to memory, movement, emotions and language. Through different studies, music therapy has been proven to help treat people with Alzheimer’s. This is because music can help strengthen the parts of the brain that have been affected by Alzheimer’s, according to oxjournal.org.
