Mild Cognitive Impairment Hurts Decisions

Elderly people with mild cognitive impairment may be less capable than healthy adults of making appropriate medical decisions, a U.S. study found.

University of Alabama at Birmingham researchers compared 60 patients with mild cognitive impairment, 31 with mild Alzheimer’s disease and 56 healthy controls in observing their medical decision-making capacity.

Medical decision-making capacity refers to a patient’s cognitive and emotional capacity to accept a proposed medical treatment, refuse treatment or 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, published in the journal Neurology, indicated that patients with mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease performed comparably to the healthy control group on minimal consent standards such as expressing a treatment choice. However, mild cognitive impairment patients performed significantly below the healthy controls on three clinically relevant standards of appreciation, reasoning and understanding.