Proper Dementia Diagnosis May Help Assure Patients Receive Appropriate Treatment

People with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) can be differentiated from those with very mild Alzheimer disease (AD), and from healthy control subjects, according to an article in the AMA’s Archives of Neurology.  The researchers compared three groups of subjects, 106 patients with mild AD, 76 patients with MCI and 234 healthy control subjects, to quantitatively characterize and describe the clinical course of patients diagnosed as having MCI.

Patients with MCI are at increased risk of progressing to AD.  They appear to constitute a clinical entity that can be characterized for treatment interventions, the authors write.  The researchers also reported that the patients with MCI can be differentiated from the control group in the area of memory but not cognitive functions.  When patients with MCI were compared with those with mild AD, their memory performance was similar. However,  the mild AD patients were more impaired in other cognitive domains as well.  Over time, the MCI group declined at a rate greater than that of the controls while those with mild AD declined more rapidly than the patients with MCI.

According to the authors, a great deal of interest has been generated over the clinical identification of the boundary or transitional state between normal aging and dementia, or more specifically, AD.  Several studies have indicated that these transitional patients with MCI are at increased risk for developing AD ranging from 10 percent to 12 percent per year.  Patients with MCI are entering treatment trials.  Some investigators note that while many MCI patients progress to AD, not all do.  Consequently, the distinction is important.