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. 2012 Sep;8(3):190-7.
doi: 10.3988/jcn.2012.8.3.190. Epub 2012 Sep 27.

The effect of cognitive training in patients with mild cognitive impairment and early Alzheimer's disease: a preliminary study

Hye Ran Hwang  1 , Seong Hye Choi, Dae Hyun Yoon, Byung-Nam Yoon, Young Ju Suh, Daehyung Lee, Im-Tae Han, Chang-Gi Hong
Affiliations

The effect of cognitive training in patients with mild cognitive impairment and early Alzheimer's disease: a preliminary study

Hye Ran Hwang et al. J Clin Neurol. 2012 Sep.

Abstract

Background and purpose: The objective of this study was to determine the benefits of cognitive training in patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) and those with early Alzheimer's disease (AD).

Methods: Eleven patients with aMCI and nine with early AD (stage 4 on the Global Deterioration Scale) participated in this study. Six participants with aMCI and six with AD were allocated to the cognitive training group, while five participants with aMCI and three with AD were allocated to a wait-list control group. Multicomponent cognitive training was administered in 18 weekly, individual sessions. Outcome measures were undertaken at baseline, and at 2 weeks and 3 months of follow-up.

Results: In the trained MCI group, there were significant improvements in the delayed-recall scores on the Seoul Verbal Learning Test at both the 2-week and 3-month follow-ups compared with baseline (baseline, 1.6±1.5; 2 weeks, 4.4±1.5, p=0.04; 3 months, 4.6±2.3, p=0.04). The phonemic fluency scores (1.0±0.8 vs. 5.0±1.8, p=0.07) and Korean Mini-Mental State Examination scores (18.8±0.5 vs. 23.8±2.2, p=0.07) also showed a tendency toward improvement at the 2-week follow-up compared to baseline in the trained AD group.

Conclusions: This study provides evidence of the effectiveness of cognitive training in aMCI and early AD. The efficacy of cognitive training programs remains to be verified in studies with larger samples and a randomized design.

Keywords: Alzheimer's disease; cognitive therapy; memory; mild cognitive impairment; training.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have no financial conflicts of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Changes in the delayed recall scores on the Seoul Verbal Learning Test (SVLT) (A) and Korean Mini-Mental State Examination (K-MMSE) (B). A: In the trained mild cognitive impairment (MCI) group (♦), the delayed recall scores on the SVLT showed a significant improvement at both the 2-week and 3-month follow-ups compared to the baseline score (1.6±1.5 vs. 4.4±1.5, p=0.04; 1.6±1.5 vs. 4.6±2.3, p=0.04). B: The K-MMSE score showed a tendency to improve at the 2-week follow-up compared to baseline in the trained Alzheimer's disease (AD) group (○; 18.8±0.5 vs. 23.8±2.2, p=0.07).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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