A new rehabilitation methodology, developed in Chile with the support of the US National Academy of Medicine, has proved to enhance memory functions and has the potential to prevent diagnoses of dementia in older people with mild cognitive impairment.
Between 30-50% of older people with mild cognitive impairment will develop dementia within three years, according to general estimates. Being able to avoid this diagnosis, using no invasive interventions, would be a turning point for the prevention of the disease that affects around 200 thousand older people in Chile.
A group of researchers at the Millenium Institute for Care Research (MICARE) developed a new rehabilitation methodology that combines virtual reality and transcranial stimulation to enhance memory functions in older people with mild cognitive impairment.
“When someone has dementia it is much harder to intervene. That’s why we aim to act within the three years since the diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment until a potential diagnosis of dementia occurs”, says Izaskun Álvarez-Aguado, a researcher at the Millenium Institute MICARE and lecturer at Universidad de las Américas (UDLA), leader of the project.
Noninvasive technique
The procedure was tested by 37 volunteers aged between 59 and 92 during 28 sessions over three and a half months at the virtual reality laboratory in UDLA.
“We designed two scenarios of virtual reality: a supermarket and a city, in which we exercised six cognitive functions through various tasks or missions with different levels of difficulty. Previous to the implementation of virtual reality, we used neuromodulation, which is a technique that uses electric stimulation to influence the nervous system activity”, explains Álvarez-Aguado.
Researchers compared the results before and after intervention in the various cognitive functions. This data was complemented by testimonies from group interviews.
“The most enhanced areas were memory, reasoning, executive functions, and processing. However, we observed improvement in all the functions evaluated and in all the participants”.
Miguel Roselló, also part of the research team, commented that the results “show the potential noninvasive technological interventions have in cognitive rehabilitation”.
Positive results
The program volunteers find the use of the procedure has positively impacted both their functional and cognitive performance. Luis García believes that being part of the study has helped him “to maintain the brain active and to face with more confidence the challenges of cognitive impairment”. He adds: “I’m totally convinced that with all the help I received in the program I can live without being a burden to my loved ones, and I will fight every day making efforts to stay lucid”.
Myriam García highlights that exploring the scenes of virtual reality was easy and fun. “It’s a novel thing for one to do, it’s relaxing and it takes us to another dimension and way of thinking”, she says. Margarita del Campo feels her memory has improved: “I leave feeling renovated, with a sharper mind. I would recommend older people to join the program because it is very good and we hadn’t had this anywhere else. I think hospitals should have it”.
The next step to scale up the project is to streamline virtual reality platform, including tasks associated with other types of cognitive functions to then invite older people to use the procedure again.
The project was supported by the US National Academy of Medicine (NAM), following an agreement with the Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo de Chile (ANID) to finance research projects aimed at improving the wellbeing of older people. It also included the collaboration of the software company Minverso to develop the virtual reality scenarios and the platform to collect the data.
