Sadeghi Nahid, Khalaji Hassan,Noroozian Maryam and Mokhtari Pouneh
The world is aging. The increase of lifetime and the number of elderly people cause some concerns about the future and inevitable problems which will exist for this particular period of time. Now the scientists and experts of Aging, Geriatrics and other sciences are trying to find ways to prevent diseases, delay aging and successful aging experience. It is expected that each of 10 people over 60 suffers Alzheimer and this rate reaches 4in people over than 85. Alzheimer is a progressive disease, which reaches more advanced stages in case of non-intervention. Some methods include physical and mental activities have shown that they can be effective in preventing and eliminating disease progression. The objective of this study is also verifying the effect of physical and mental activities on the memory function level of the 50-70 year-old-women who are affected by memory impairment. 32 female subjects (mean age 61/1 ± 6/5) with MCI = 0.5 (mild cognitive impairment), illiterate, healthy (Based on the medical view for participation in physical activities) and without regular physical and mental activities in Tehran elderly nursing home were selected. The randomly practices intervening: the first group: education of reading and writing, the second group: physical activities and in the third group; education of reading and writing and physical activities. Also the fourth group (control) participated in the research without any activities. (Each group consisted of eight persons). Duration of intervening was three months, three sessions per week and each session was held for 60 minutes. The combined exercise group attended in each class for 30 minutes. For the diagnosis of dementia, the Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) was used. Also in order to control the depression level before and after implementation of the plan; the Geriatric Dementia Scale (GDS) was done. To evaluate the datum paired t-test and the ANCOVA analysis method and the Bonferroni post hoc were used. The results indicated that all three intervening methods in the mental, physical and combined methods have had significant effect on the memory impairment in increasing the memory level of the 50-70 year-old-women with MCI and the highest effects existed in the physical activities group and the less effect existed in the combined activities group. Being affected for subscales in all three groups was the memory subscale. In this consideration, no changes were observed in the depression level and the level of depression has not interfered in the function level of the participators. In this study, interventional procedures including physical and mental and combined activities have caused an improvement in the memory of 50-70-year-old women with mild cognitive impairment. So doing the physical and mental performance in patients with less cognitive impairment is effective.
