Four things to listen to during an MRI, and what 400 patients reported afterwards

An MRI scanner is loud, confined and long, and anxious patients move, which ruins the images and the schedule. Abuejheisheh and colleagues gave 400 patients one of four things to listen to during the scan: recitation of the Holy Quran, music, nature sounds, or nothing. Afterwards everyone completed the anxiety and stress subscales of the Arabic DASS-21.

Patients who listened to Quran recitation reported the lowest anxiety and stress, and those who listened to music the second lowest. Nature sounds and silence came behind. Taken at face value, that ranks four cheap, zero-risk options in a setting where anxiety has a real cost.

The design is what keeps this at the bottom of our scale. It was a patient-preference trial: rather than being assigned at random, participants largely got what they said they wanted. That makes the groups different in ways other than the audio. Somebody who asks for Quran recitation during a scan may already draw on a religious practice when frightened, may be calmer going in, or may be more inclined to report that something helped. The study tells you what happened to people who chose each option. It does not tell you what would happen if you handed a given option to the next patient.

Limitations. Allocation by preference, no blinding, no attention-matched comparison (a condition with headphones and neutral audio), and a single self-report measure collected once after the scan. There was no objective marker such as heart rate, scan-completion rate, motion artefact or sedation use, which are the outcomes a radiology department would actually act on. The sample is from one cultural setting where Quran recitation carries a specific meaning, so the ranking between the audio conditions should not be read as a general finding about which sounds are calming. We report the result because the sample is large and the question is practical, and we grade it weak because preference-based allocation and a subjective endpoint cannot support more.