Medical phenome of musicians: an investigation of health records collected on 9803 musically active individuals

Previous studies suggest that musicians may be at higher risk for a set of medical problems; however, this literature has been limited by relatively small sample sizes, self‐reports, and lack of controls. To address such limitations, we examined trends in the medical care of musicians in an Electronic Health Record database. On the basis of a collection of keywords and regular expressions in the patients’ clinical notes, we identified 9803 “musicians” that we matched for sex, median age (across the medical record), ethnicity, race, the length of record, and the number of visits with 49,015 controls. We fitted 1263 logistic regression models to determine whether the phenotype was correlated with musicianship. Two hundred fifty‐seven phenotypes were more prevalent in musicians than controls after Bonferroni adjustment (P < 7.6 × 10(–6)), including diseases of the larynx and vocal cords (OR = 2.32 (95% CI: 2.25–2.40)), and hearing loss (OR = 1.36 (95% CI: 1.32–1.39)). Fifteen phenotypes were significantly more prevalent in controls than musicians, including coronary atherosclerosis (OR = 0.91 (95% CI: 0.89–0.94)). Although being a musician was related to many occupational health problems, we identified protective effects of musicianship in which certain disorders were less common in musicians than in controls, indicating that active musical engagement could have health benefits analogous to athletic engagement.