Amanda Chan, "Music and Health: 11 Ways Playing and Listening to Music Help Both Body and Mind"

In her April 12, 2012 article, "Music and Health: 11 Ways Playing and Listening to Music Help Both Body and Mind", Amanda Chan outlines 11 benefits of music.  The article also features a short slideshow documenting the findings.  Overall, music has excellent stress-reducing properties and may also enhance overall neural fitness.  The data, synthesized from various academic and medical sources, are summarized below:

1. Eases anxiety, lowers blood pressure, and enhances mood in cancer patients.
2. Daily doses of music reduce stress and enhances mood.
3. Music--specifically melodic, as opposed to rhythmic music--lowers stress in surgical patients.
4. Protects sound-processing abilities: lifelong musicians, both amateurs and professionals, who'd started music training by age 16, had at least six years of formal lessons on a musical instrument and were continuing to practice at the time the study did better than non-musicians on a battery of hearing tests which tested the ability to detect short gaps in otherwise continuous sound, hear sound variations in a noisy environment, and distinguish words in the presence of background noise. The more musicans practiced, the greater the benefit.
5. Improves heart health by dilating the inner lining of blood vessels by 26%, promoting blood flow.  Caveat: listening to anxiety-producing music, as opposed to happy music, reduced blood vessel diameter by 6%.
6. Music is an effective distractor in anxiety-prone patients, reducing pain.
7. Music training in childhood increases verbal memory and recall on tests: benefits that can't be explained by age, education level, or one's family's socioeconomic level.
8. Protects mental sharpness in old age: people with the most musical training in their lives had the best mental sharpness and also scored highest on brain functioning tests. 
9. In mice who'd been given heart transplants, those who listened to music had a better survival rate.
10. Improves stroke recovery: patients who listened to music showed improved verbal memory and attention.
11. Decreases anxiety as well as massage therapy.