Cognitive Training to Reduce Incidence of Cognitive Impairment in Older Adults
Dementia is the most expensive medical condition in the US and increases in prevalence with age. More than 5 million Americans have Alzheimer's disease, the most common form of dementia. Mild cognitive impairment is a transitional stage between normal cognitive aging and Alzheimer's disease or another type of dementia, and is indicative of higher risk for dementia. In addition to the obvious health and quality-of-life ramifications of dementia, there are high direct (e.g., subsidizing residential care needs) and indirect (e.g., lost productivity of family caregivers) economic costs. Implementing interventions to prevent MCI and dementia among older adults is of critical importance to health and maintained quality-of-life for millions of Americans. Recent data analyses from the Advanced Cognitive Training in Vital Elderly study (ACTIVE) indicate that a specific cognitive intervention, speed of processing training (SPT), significantly delays the incidence of cognitive impairment across 10 years. The primary contribution of the proposed research will be the determination of whether this cognitive training technique successfully delays the onset of clinically defined MCI or dementia across three years.
• Be age 65 or older at time of consent
• Have ability to speak and understand English or Spanish
• Report adequate sensorimotor capacity to perform the computer exercises
• Report adequate visual capacity to read from a computer screen at a typical viewing distance
• Show adequate auditory capacity to understand conversational speech
• Show adequate motor capacity to touch a computer screen or control a computer mouse.
• Have no evidence of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) or dementia, as assessed by the Montreal Cognitive Assessment score \>=26.
• Have adequate mental health (no self-reported diagnoses of mental illness that would interfere with ability to comply with study procedures or benefit from intervention)
• Wiling to complete all study activities
• Ability to understand study procedures and comply with them for the length of the study