Impaired Awareness and Related Factor in Persons with Mild Cognitive Impairment and Mild Alzheimer's Disease

Recent estimates suggest that 15-24% of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients have impaired awareness of their memory or cognitive deficits. Even though the nature of unawareness is not yet fully understood, but in view of its potential importance for adaptation to living with dementia, this is a key area for research. Patients who are aware of deficits in their functioning may experience a decline in their quality of life (QoL) and display emotional distress. As to FCs, patient’s unawareness may cause difficulty in caring and burden, which in turn, may decrease their own QoL as well. Investigating the relationship between awareness and AD contributes to the understanding of the pathogenesis of the disorder and help people with dementia and their caregivers to live a better life. However, most of the studies related to awareness focused on memory problems, and few of them have taken a multi-domain perspective to explore the ways in which different domains of awareness may impact persons with dementia and their FCs differently, and how related factors influence the levels of awareness domains. Even fewer studies focus on people with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to evaluate the awareness discrepancy in different domains between MCI people’s subjective evaluation and actual performance as well as MCI people’s self-report and informants’observation. Therefore, the primary purpose of this study is to systematically develop a culturally sensitive questionnaire to assess the awareness of everyday memory, and to examine its psychometric properties in MCI and earlyAD patients. The second purpose is to examine the levels of awareness domains (cognitive domain, behavioral domain, and affective domain) in MCI patients compared with earlyAD patients, and cognitively intact elderly and young persons. The third purpose is to explore the possible related factors with the levels of awareness domains in MCI patients and earlyAD patients. The fourth purpose is to evaluate the impacts of awareness domains on patients’and FCs’QoL. As new methodological techniques evolve, the MCI criteria can be refined further by identifying early indices, related factors and more explanatory model of awareness.

Project ID:PC9808-0523
External Project ID:NSC98-2314-B182-057-MY2