New research from UAB (University of Alabama at Birmingham) indicates that patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), considered a pre-cursor to Alzheimer's disease (AD), have diminished skills in making important medical decisions compared to healthy adults.
The findings, published this week in the journal Neurology, have major implications for patients, clinicians and researchers in the field of memory loss and dementia.
The research team compared 60 patients with MCI, 31 with mild Alzheimer's disease, and 56 healthy controls in regard to their medical decision-making capacity (MDC). MDC refers to a patient's cognitive and emotional capacity to accept a proposed medical treatment, refuse treatment or to select among treatment options. Participants were administered an instrument measuring the capacity to consent to treatment and also given a comprehensive battery of neuropsychological tests.
The findings indicated that patients with MCI and AD performed comparably to the healthy control group on minimal consent standards such as expressing a treatment choice. MCI patients continued to match the healthy control group in their ability to make a reasonable treatment choice, while AD patients performed worse. However, MCI patients performed significantly below the healthy controls on three clinically relevant standards of appreciation, reasoning and understanding.