View clinical trials related to Dementia.
Filter by:The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of acupuncture on heart rate variability, skin conductance (sweating), and rated behavioral expression of agitation, irritability, and anxiety and mood in qualifying adults with a diagnosis of cognitively unimpaired, or probable Alzheimer's Disease, Frontotemporal Dementia or Dementia with Lewy Bodies. Study subjects will all receive one real acupuncture treatment; mood scales will be assessed before and after. Massachusetts General Hospital is paying for this research to be done.
Background: To effectively alleviate suffering and improve quality of life for patients with serious illness and their caregivers, palliative care (PC) services must be offered across multiple settings. Research is needed to determine how best to optimize home-based palliative care (HBPC) services to meet the needs of individuals with high symptom burden and functional limitations. Aim: The investigators will compare a standard HBPC model that includes routine home visits by a nurse and provider with a more efficient tech-supported HBPC model that promotes timely inter-professional team coordination via synchronous video consultation with the provider while the nurse is in the patient's home. The investigators hypothesize that tech-supported HBPC will be as effective as standard HBPC. Design: Cluster randomized trial. Registered nurses (n~130) will be randomly assigned to the tech-supported or standard HBPC model so that half of the patient-caregiver dyads will receive one of the two models. Setting/Participants: Kaiser Permanente (15 Southern California and Oregon sites). Patients (n=10,000) with any serious illness and a prognosis of 1-2 years and their caregivers (n=4,800) Methods: Patients and caregivers will receive standard PC services: comprehensive needs assessment and care planning, pain and symptom management, education/skills training, medication management, emotional/spiritual support; care coordination, referral to other services, and 24/7 phone assistance. Results: Primary patient outcomes: symptom improvement at 1 month and days spent at home in the last six months of life; caregiver outcome: perception of preparedness for caregiving. Conclusion: Should the more efficient tech-supported HBPC model achieves comparable improvements in outcomes that matter most to patients and caregivers, this would have a lasting impact on PC practice and policy.
About the research There are currently 850,000 people living with dementia in the United Kingdom. It is now understand that Alzheimer's disease (AzD) can result from damaged blood vessels in the brain. Brain blood flow can be measured using ultrasound, known as transcranial Doppler ultrasonography (or TCD). Brain training (BT) uses exercises or brain-teasers to try to make the brain work faster and more accurately. In recent years, BT has been used to try to improve memory, mood, learning, quality of life, and ability to carry out every-day activities in people with dementia. Aims 1. To find out how acceptable and manageable this BT program is for people with dementia to undertake larger studies of BT in the future. 2. To look for any benefits for people with dementia, such as, improvements in quality of life, ability to carry out everyday tasks, mood, and brain blood flow. How will the research be carried out? - Forty patients with AzD, or mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and twenty healthy older adults will be recruited from memory and geriatric clinics, Join Dementia Research, general practice surgeries and community groups. - Participants will be randomly assigned to brain training or control. The control group will be offered the program at the end of the study. - First visit: Participants will complete questionnaires on quality of life, mood, everyday abilities, memory and an assessment of brain blood flow - Brain training program: Participants will complete 15-30 minute sessions, 3-5 times per week - Follow-up: participants will repeat the questionnaires and assessment of brain blood flow - Interviews and feedback: to discuss how participants felt the program went, and find out if there are any ways it could be improved.
There are currently no cognitive tests that have been validated as screening tools for people with dementia and comorbid hearing loss. This is particularly important given the high prevalence of hearing impairment in older adults presenting to memory services and the risk of misdiagnosis of dementia in this population as outlined above. Cognitive tests validated in hearing impaired populations will also be important as outcome tools for interventional research aiming to find out if treating hearing loss may reduce dementia risk in the longer term.
The primary objective of the study is to assess the safety impact of continuing aducanumab dosing in asymptomatic Amyloid-related Imaging Abnormalities (ARIA) in participants with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) due to Alzheimer's disease (AD) or with mild AD dementia. The secondary objective of the study is to characterize ARIA, from both the imaging and the clinical perspective and to characterize the safety, tolerability, pharmacokinetics (PK), and immunogenicity of aducanumab.
EpxCogScreen is a phone-based intervention to administer the Rapid Cognitive Screen, a validated screening tool for dementia, over SMS text messaging. The results of the screen are sent to the physician automatically, which allows physicians to monitor their patients and gives them the ability to respond rapidly to any concerns of cognitive decline. In this study, patients' at-home RCS scores done by EpxCogScreen will be compared to their in-clinic RCS scores, and to clinical diagnosis of dementia (where available), to investigate the validity of EpxCogScreen.
The study procedure of simultaneous VFSS and DDS measurement will be completed in one day and the subject will be followed within 2 business days after the study procedure to monitor for adverse events.
Alzheimer's Disease and Related Disorders (dementia) poses a significant challenge to our public health. While many persons with dementia are cared for by friends and family in the community with the assistance of home healthcare and hospice, most clinicians and agencies are ill prepared to care for this population and therefore have difficulty assisting patients and caregivers in maintaining quality of life leading to adverse patient outcomes, increased caregiver stress and burnout, and healthcare utilization. This study will utilize a cluster randomized controlled design with 6 care teams at a single study site to examine the ability of a multi-component evidence-based practice hospice care quality improvement program for registered nurses, social workers and chaplains to improve the quality of life and reduce healthcare utilization for persons with dementia and their informal caregiver.
In this proposal, we will examine processing speed training (PST) as a potential intervention to reduce the risk of developing long-term cognitive impairment after a delirium episode.
Mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) from explosions is the "signature injury" of Veterans who have deployed to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Although the immediate effects of a single mTBI usually resolve over days or weeks, multiple mTBIs can lead to both persistent symptoms and, years later, to two fatal progressive brain diseases, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and Alzheimer's disease (AD). It is believed that CTE and AD are caused by nerve damaging chemicals called tau and beta amyloid produced by the brain but which are not removed from the brain in a normal manner in persons with mTBIs. The investigators will determine in Veterans who experienced mTBIs whether a clinically available drug called prazosin increases removal of tau and beta amyloid from the brain. This will be accomplished by seeing if prazosin reduces the amount of tau and beta amyloid in the spinal fluid that surrounds the brain. If the investigators find such reductions, prazosin will be evaluated as a preventative treatment for CTE and AD in future studies.