scholarly journals ImproveCog, a cognitive stimulation program for people with mild cognitive impairment and dementia: First stage of development

Psicologia ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 27-44
Author(s):  
Laura Meireles ◽  
Selene G. Vicente
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Impairment ◽  
Mild Cognitive Impairment ◽  
Health Professionals ◽  
Research Council ◽  
Medical Research Council ◽  
Cognitive Stimulation ◽  
Individual Interviews ◽  
Clinical Phase ◽  
Stage Of Development ◽  
Stage 1

Cognitive stimulation seems to be an important tool to slow the rate of cognitive decline due to dementia. This study describes the development of a cognitive stimulation program (ImproveCog) for people with Mild Cognitive Impairment, Alzheimer’s Disease, and behavioral variant Frontotemporal Dementia, within the Medical Research Council framework. Stage 1 established the theoretical and evidence basis of the program through a review of the existing cognitive stimulation programs as well as cognitive exercises and their efficacy (Pre-Clinical Phase) and includes qualitative testing through five focus group with eighteen health professionals and twelve individual interviews with people with cognitive impairment (Phase I - Modeling). An initial version of the program, which consisted of twelve 90-min weekly sessions and included a manual with cognitive stimulation exercises to be performed at home, was ready to be implemented in a pilot study to create a final version of ImproveCog.

scholarly journals LINGUISTIC MEASURES OF SPOKEN UTTERANCES FOR DETECTING MILD COGNITIVE IMPAIRMENT

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. S224-S225
Author(s):  
Meysam Asgari ◽  
Jeffrey Kaye ◽  
Hiroko Dodge
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Impairment ◽  
Mild Cognitive Impairment ◽  
Cognitive Stimulation ◽  
Support Vector ◽  
Svm Classifier ◽  
Healthy Controls ◽  
Document Frequency ◽  
Trained Interviewer ◽  
Validation Procedure ◽  
Characteristic Area

Abstract Studies have shown that speech characteristics can aid in early-identification of those with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). We performed a linguistic analysis on spoken utterances of 41 participants (15 MCI, 26 healthy controls) from conversations with a trained interviewer using the Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) method. Data came from a randomized controlled behavioral clinical trial (ClinicalTrials.gov: NCT01571427) to examine effects of conversation-based cognitive stimulation on cognitive functions among older adults with normal cognition or MCI, which served as a pilot study for I-CONECT. From the collected spoken utterances we first constructed a fixed-dimensional feature vector using TF-IDF. Next, to distinguish between MCI and healthy controls, we trained a support vector machine (SVM) classifier on per-subject feature vectors according to 5-fold cross-validation procedure. Our results verify the effectiveness of TF-IDF features in this classification task with Receiver Operating Characteristic Area Under Curve of 81%, well above chance at 65%.

scholarly journals Role of nurses in addressing modifiable risk factors for early Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (8) ◽  
pp. 460-469 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Hope
Keyword(s):  
Risk Factors ◽  
Alzheimer’S Disease ◽  
Alzheimer's Disease ◽  
Cognitive Impairment ◽  
Mild Cognitive Impairment ◽  
Cognitive Decline ◽  
Health Professionals ◽  
Current Evidence ◽  
Modifiable Risk Factors ◽  
Early Alzheimer’S Disease

A multidisciplinary advisory group of health professionals involved in dementia care assessed the current evidence base regarding modifiable risk factors (MRFs) for early Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment. Based on evidence from the published literature and clinical experience, MRFs in four areas were identified where there is evidence to support interventions that may help delay cognitive decline or reduce the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease: medical (eg cardiovascular risk factors), psychosocial (eg depression, anxiety, social isolation), lifestyle (eg lack of physical activity, smoking) and nutrition (eg poor diet, lack of micronutrients). Practical guidance on how health professionals, but in particular nurses, may actively seek to address these MRFs in clinical practice was also developed. Nurses are at the forefront of patient care and, as such, are ideally placed to offer advice to patients that may proactively help mitigate the risks of cognitive decline and the development of Alzheimer's disease.

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