AD/PD 2026 | Immersive virtual reality and adaptive cognitive training PD with MCI: the CogMusT trial

Yeah, well, we are super interested in all the neuropathological things, in neurodegenerative diseases, in pharmacological treatments, but to be sincere, currently, I think, to be honest, we have to work, we have to investigate other things that we can offer to our patients, but at the end, unfortunately, we don’t have a cure for all these people suffering from several neurodegenerative diseases. Nature is a cool experiment, and nature shows us that cognitive reserve stimulation, brain reserve stimulation have an impact on how the same disease is expressed in a given individual or in another. So, although we are not saying that it’s not necessary to develop pharmacological compounds, of course they are necessary, we must be doing many other things while living with diseases for which we don’t have a cure already. And then we investigated cognitive stimulation, music therapy, through virtual reality, all these kinds of interventions, non-pharmacological interventions, but from a pretty, and it’s not because it’s my study, but from a pretty well-structured and well-designed clinical trial. One of the problems we have when we attempted to know if cognitive stimulation is something effective or not, the main problem is that the design in several trials that attempted to solve these questions are quite bad. And it’s not always easy to set all the things you need to conduct a double-blinded or at least apparently double-blinded sham-controlled clinical trial in this population. But this is what we did. And we found that when you provide a pretty well-structured cognitive stimulation protocol during several weeks, using both computers or virtual reality, and also when you provide music therapy, but we are not talking about playing the guitar. It’s about using the music as a pretty complex stimulation pattern. When you use these techniques in isolation or in combination, it changes the trajectory, at least during the six to eight months of follow-up, of those people involved in these activities compared to those not involved in these activities. People who were extremely well matched at the beginning of the study. And interestingly, all of us are aware that just because you are engaging in social activities, etc., it may be the component that benefits people who are involved in cognitive stimulation or music. But here we also looked at what is happening to the brain of these people when they are involved in these activities and our results confirm that it’s not just a question of being socially engaged in activities because cognitive stimulation, virtual reality, music therapy in people experiencing these neurodegenerative diseases change functional patterns of the brain in a positive way. So the effects of these interventions are mediated by something that is happening in the brain. And these things that are happening in the brain are clearly associated with the functional and cognitive changes we are seeing in these people who are immersed in this kind of intervention.

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