Objective: To investigate whether patients diagnosed as amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI) have also impairment in attention/executive functions and, therefore to clarify whether all subcomponents of executive control are equally affected in MCI.Background: MCI refers to the transitional state between normal ageing and dementia.Amnestic MCI is characterized by impaired episodic memory, although subtle impairment of executive functions has been noted on neuropsychological tests.Methods: We investigated 20 MCI patients and 20 normal controls using episodic memory, attention/executive functions, language and praxis tests. Results: MCI patients had a significantly lower scores on all measures of the Free and CuedSelective Reminding Test (p<0.05 to 0.01) than controls. Furthermore MCI had a greater number of perseverations (p<0.01) on Modified Card Sorting Test and the lowest performance on the Stroop test (p<0.02).Conclusion: Our findings showed impairment in episodic memory performance in MCI as compared to that of controls. In addition, MCI patients had problems with response inhibition, switching and cognitive flexibility which encompass various aspects of executive functions. This suggests that MCI may be identified by using a more detailed procedure for the assessment of cognitive decline than the evaluation of memory alone. IntroductionThe recent developments in drug treatments for Alzheimer's disease (AD) have highlighted the importance of early diagnosis and the need to characterize the cognitive profile of the earliest stages of the disease.Recent research has identified a transitional state between the cognitive changes of normal aging and AD, known as mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Other studies of MCI report cognitive deficits similar to those described by Petersen and colleagues. 5,6 However, in recent years, the literature has reported that, while memory is the hallmark of patients with amnestic MCI, they are impaired on a variety of tasks that have commonly been considered a measure of executive functions. reported recently that tasks requiring executive control are significantly affected in the preclinical phase of AD and are reliable predictors of the disease before diagnosis. The results of these studies emphasised the importance of attention and executive function in MCI patients. However, it must be pointed out that variability across studies in both tasks used to examine aspects of executive function, and in the MCI definition, makes it difficult to determine which aspects of executive control are affected in MCI. Consequently, we selected executive tasks more "universally" accepted like those mentioned in the abovecited studies. The objective was to avoid to further clouding the issues by introducing additional measures.The aims of our study were to investigate whether patients diagnosed as amnestic MCI have also impairment in attention/executive functions and, therefore to clarify whether all subcomponents of executive control are equally affected in MCI. Materials and methods ...

The PEP had no additional impact on patients but carers developed more effective disease understanding and ability of coping. Results support the idea that the PEP although improving caregivers' condition is not sufficient to improve patients' activities in daily life which requires additional individually tailored interventions provided by professionals.

Although further studies are needed for more details on the impact of cognitive stimulation programs on MCI patients, this intervention is effective in compensating associative memory difficulties of these patients. Among non-pharmacological interventions, cognitive stimulation therapy is a repeatable and inexpensive collective method that can easily be provided to various populations with the aim of slowing down the rate of decline in elderly persons with cognitive impairment.

A study was realized on 130 healthy and autonomous volunteers (60-80 years old) who met specific medical and functional inclusion criteria. A comprehensive battery of neuropsychological tests was performed at baseline (M0), 6 and 12 months (M6, M12). At M0 the results indicated that 65% were cognitively normal on each of all the neuropsychological tests, whereas 35% presented a cognitive deficit on one or more tests. At M12, 52% of the subjects who had a cognitive deficit at M0 remained impaired, whereas 48% normalized their scores: they performed as well as the subjects classified normal at M0. The results also indicated that the subjects who remained impaired at M12, had at M0 low scores on three tests or more, whereas the ones who normalized their scores had one or two failed tests. This study focuses on the risk of false positive cases and shows that low scores can be accidental. The authors propose decision rules allowing to reduce the risk of false positive cases. The observation of accidental impairment invites to be cautious and makes this 1-year follow-up study particularly relevant, since a 1-year follow-up is generally needed to diagnose very mild dementia.