国际英语新闻:Music reduces rejection of heart transplants in mice: study

LONDON, March 23 (Xinhua) -- Music could reduce rejection of heart transplants in mice by influencing the immune system, researchers said in a study published on Friday.

In the latest issue of British journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery, researchers from Japan explained their experiment with mice that received surgeries of heart transplant.

Though the transplanted organs usually fail in seven or eight days due to rejection, their lives could be prolonged significantly if the mice were exposed to certain types of music for a week.

For example, the opera La Traviata and Mozart's classic music could enhance the lives of transplanted organs to 26.5 and 20 days respectively. In some cases, the transplanted organs could even survive to more than 80 days.

However, that effect was not significant in mice exposed to the genre of New Age music, neither was it proved in mice exposed to a single fixed sound frequency, which was tested in the range from 100 Hz to 20,000 Hz.

Though the link between music and reduced rejection is not clearly understood yet, the team pinpointed the source of this protection to the spleen.

It was revealed that levels of some immune cells produced by the spleen were changed by listening to opera or Mozart.

It is well known that music has a fundamental effect on humans. Music can reduce stress, enhance relaxation, and provide a distraction from pain and therefore it is used clinically to reduce anxiety after heart attack, or to ease pain and nausea during bone marrow transplantation.