Effect of a structured course involving goal management training in older adults: A randomised controlled trial

Abstract

Objective-The objective of this study was to investigate the effects of a structured 6-week neuropsychological course on the executive functioning of older adults with cognitive complaints.Methods-A randomised controlled design was used involving 69 community dwelling individuals aged 55 years and older. Both objective and subjective measures were included to assess executive functioning. General linear model with repeated measures analysis of variance was used to examine the intervention effects.Results-After the intervention, the participants in the intervention group were significantly less annoyed by their cognitive failures, were better able to manage their executive failures and reported less anxiety symptoms than those in the waiting list control group.Conclusion-These findings indicate that a combination of psycho-education and training has the potential to change the attitude of older individuals towards their cognitive functioning.Practice implications-Because this training focussed on cognitive functions that are among the first to decline in older adults and the subjective evaluation of the people after training was quite favourable, the proposed intervention may be considered a valuable contribution to cognitive interventions for older adults.

Gist reasoning training in cognitively normal seniors

“…Thus these findings suggest that overall participants' ability for deeper encoding of information through gist reasoning improved with training. Such training related gains extend previous findings of benefits from strategy training studies in normally aging seniors (Ball et al, 2002;Levine et al, 2007;van Hooren et al, 2007) to higher-order cognitive function such as gist reasoning, a skill shown to be essential to everyday life function (Adams et al, 1990;Ulatowska and Chapman, 1994;Meyer and Poon, 2001).…”

“…Studies with training that targeted reasoning and problem solving in seniors have shown positive changes on self-reported measures such as activities of daily living, anxiety levels, etc. (Willis et al, 2006;Levine et al, 2007;van Hooren et al, 2007). For example, training that targets gist reasoning, defined as the ability to derive global meaning from explicit details, has been shown to improve meaning abstraction and other executive functions such as inhibition and working memory in clinical populations such as those with brain injury (Vas et al, 2009(Vas et al, , 2010, stroke (Ulatowska and Chapman, 1989), and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (Gamino et al, 2009).…”

Efeitos de um treino de atenção, memória e funções executivas na cognição de idosos saudáveis

“…Os resultados mostraram que, depois da intervenção, os participantes do grupo de treino coletivo mostraram mais estabilidade, menos sentimentos de ansiedade e de estresse sobre o funcionamento da memória. Da mesma forma, Hooren et al (2007) verificaram que, após o treino coletivo, os participantes do GE se mostraram mais hábeis para administrar suas falhas executivas e apresentaram menos sintomas de ansiedade em relação ao GC. Ball et al (2002) avaliaram a efetividade e a durabilidade de três intervenções cognitivas distintas (treino de memória, treino de argumentação e treino de velocidade de processamento), com dez sessões cada, sobre o desempenho de idosos saudáveis em habilidades cognitivas e em atividades instrumentais de vida diária (AIVDs).…”

Response to Goal Management Training in Veterans with blast-related mild traumatic brain injury

“…However, only four of the patients included in this study were diagnosed with TBI, with no report of their severity level [15]. Yet, GMT has been shown to be efficacious in other populations including elderly and abstinent polysubstance abusers [16][17][18]. Levine et al speculated from their initial study that patients with mTBI might benefit from GMT more than patients with severe TBI because of their ability to better utilize learned strategies [9].…”