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Cognitive Stimulation Can Help Patients with Dementia
By jeremyc | February 20, 2012
It has been recently found that a series of group activities designed for stimulating thought, memory and conversation can be helpful in improving the mental functions of patients with mild to moderate dementia.
Robert Winningham, Professor, University of Western Oregon, says that people working in nursing homes, assisted living facilities and memory care communities can use this information to improve their patients’ cognitive function. The therapy is termed as cognitive stimulation, and it involves group activities conducted one or more times in a week for at least for a month. The sessions may include show-and-tell activities with objects, drawing, baking, discussing current events and other activities that need participants to use their minds.
718 patients were involved in the study. Stimulation sessions continued for 30 to 90 minutes, and they were held as many as 5 times per week. The studies lasted from one month to 2 years.
The study was led by Bob Woods, professor at the Bangor University, UK, said that in dementia, patients become a little withdrawn and apathetic. Therefore, such stimulation activities keep their minds engaged and help them stay active for at least some time. After end of the study, patients were tested to assess their mental functioning. Patients who participated in cognitive stimulation group scored 1-2 points more than those who did not. The tests ranged from 0 to 30 and 0 to 70. Woods says that though the effects are minimal, they are encouraging. People having dementia decline by some points 6 months or every year. An increase of even one or two points in such patients can mean that their condition has stabilized and has not progressed.
However, other activities of daily life, such as shopping for grocery, showed no improvements after this cognitive stimulation. Winningham says that this is quite disappointing, as there is need to find out ways for improving it. This will allow the patients to remain independent and decrease their health care costs. He mentions that mental gain is of utmost importance, and employing training staff at nursing care facilities and assisted living facilities for providing cognitive stimulation to the patients is worth it. As compared to expensive drugs and therapies, cognitive stimulation for improving cognitive function is an inexpensive way. Before such studies were held, drug therapies were considered to be the only thing to help such people.
Woods says that most of such studies focus on interventions given under group sessions only. But it is yet to be found out how individual sessions can be helpful for such patients. Such individual sessions can be given to the patient by a family member too. He hopes that grandchildren would love to give such cognitive stimulation sessions to their grandparents having dementia.
The report has been published by Cochrane Collaboration, in which, the authors disclosed that they may earn money by giving manuals and training for cognitive stimulation of dementia patients. Cochrane is an international network of researchers which aims at consolidating and reviewing studies on given medical treatment methods.
Topics: | Alzheimer's/Dementia |
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