Prospective and Retrospective Memory Complaints in Mild Cognitive Impairment and Mild Alzheimer's Disease

Abstract

C urrent management attempts for Alzheimer's disease (AD) focus on the identification of individuals in the preclinical stage. This has led to the development of the diagnostic concept of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), which applies to individuals with declining cognitive abilities but largely preserved everyday functioning. Previous findings indicate that prospective memory deficits are a sensitive marker of preclinical AD and that awareness of prospective memory failures is particularly high, based on its dependence on executive functions. Thus, the goal of this study was to evaluate the usefulness of subjective prospective versus retrospective memory complaints for an initial screening for MCI and their respective associations with executive functions. 71 healthy older adults, 27 MCI patients, and 9 patients with mild AD completed the Prospective and Retrospective Memory Questionnaire (PRMQ) and three executive functions tests. The healthy and the MCI group could not be distinguished by their level of subjective prospective or retrospective memory complaints, but the mild AD patients differed from the other groups by complaining more about retrospective than prospective memory failures. For the healthy older adults, the prospective memory complaints were correlated to an inhibition test, whereas they did not correlate with any of the executive function tests in the MCI patients. In contrast, in both groups the retrospective memory complaints were related to a task switching test. The findings are discussed with respect to differences between the three groups in cognitive abilities, attention to failures of, use of mnemonic aids for, and everyday demands of prospective and retrospective memory.

How Valid Are Subjective Ratings of Prospective Memory in Mild Cognitive Impairment and Early Dementia?

“…The results indicated that self-rated PM difficulties were equivalent across the three groups [8]. The findings of Eschen et al therefore suggest that the validity of self-report assessment may be limited.…”

Enhancing prospective memory in mild cognitive impairment: The role of enactment

“…When using this encoding strategy particular emphasis should be giving to actions which would be less associated with the context of performance as such actions would, as identified across our results, be less likely to be remembered in the absence of such manipulation. Considering that PM may be particularly affected at an early stage in the development of Alzheimer's Disease (Costa, et al, 2010;Lee et al, 2015), constituting a great object of concern, distress and even frustration not only for these patients but also for their carers (Eschen et al, 2009), and placing at risk individual's social relationships and maintenance of independence (Costa, Carlesimo, & Caltagirone, 2012), the use of motoric encoding might constitute an extremely advantageous tool for PM rehabilitation in prodromal Alzheimer's Disease with positive repercussions in the achievement of a better quality of life for healthy and cognitively impaired older adults.…”

“…Such prospective memory (PM; Meacham & Leiman, 1982) is especially disrupted in AD (Thompson, Henry, Withall, Rendell, & Brodaty, 2011), presenting a severe threat to the individual's health and social relationships while increasing the burden of care (e.g. Eschen, Martin, Gasser, & Kliegel, 2009;Zogg, Woods, Sauceda, Wiebe, & Simoni, 2012). PM deficits may appear early in the neurodegenerative process (cf.…”

Instruments of Active Search and Assessment of Memory Complaint. A Systematic Review

“…Taken together, these findings are indicative more of a reflection of humor states and personality regarding self-reported memory assessed by PRMQ in an older population than individual differences in memory and cognitive capacity. Eschen et al [35] and Steinberg et al [36] assessed PRMQ utility for an initial MCI screening; amongst its findings MCI patients reported greater prospective and retrospective memory deficits. In a healthy older adults sample, the authors described a higher quantity of subjective prospective memory complaints compared to retrospective memory.…”