Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) presents a challenging frontier in healthcare due to the limited availability of effective drugs. Despite its prevalence and potential progression to dementia, there remains a notable gap in pharmacological interventions targeting MCI. This month’s Editors’ Choice takes a different perspective and uses a story re-telling intervention delivered by speech and language therapists to improve memory function. Although this is a small study, it reminds us that there is potential for non-pharmacological interventions to be an important part of dementia prevention while the search for effective medicines continues. Many thanks as always to our reviewers for all their hard work and contributions.
Nazia Munir and Hannah Cooper
Prophylactic interventions to reduce the risk of the onset of dementia are extremely topical. Given the lack of cures or even disease-modifying interventions, dementia remains one of the most feared diseases. This study describes a randomised controlled trial of a discourse intervention delivered over 10 one-hour therapy sessions. Fourteen participants were randomised to either no treatment or the 10-week five-step intervention, delivered by a speech and language therapist as outpatient appointments. Treatment focused on story retell and regeneration with visuospatial cues and word span tasks. Results demonstrated a significant improvement in information units retrieved and comprehended on treated and untreated stories by the treatment group. No change was observed in the no treatment group. Whilst this study focused on a small group of people with amnestic MCI and employed a pre-determined, non-person-centred story design, it has important findings that need to be replicated with a larger sample. Given the impending tidal wave of patients with dementia, this study presents compelling prophylactic evidence of the effect of non-pharmacological interventions for dementia.
