Enhancing Everyday Autonomy for People With Dementia

Dementia Clinical Trial

Official title: Enhancing Everyday Autonomy as a Means to Reduce the Neuropsychiatric Symptoms of Dementia

Status Withdrawn

Clinical Trial Summary

Dementia is a highly disabling major neurocognitive disorder. Although cognitive symptoms drive the diagnosis of dementia, neuropsychiatric symptoms (NPS), such as agitation, aggression, and psychosis, are common and associated with increased morbidity/mortality, increased care partner distress, and earlier institutionalization. Although these symptoms are debilitating and experienced by more than 90% of people with dementia, there are currently no FDA-approved treatments. There remains a critical need for safe and effective interventions for NPS that can be easily administered and monitored in typical clinical settings.

One hypothesis for the etiology of NPS is that, as cognitive impairment progresses, there is a decline in the sense of autonomy and an increase in unmet needs that a person with dementia (PWD) is unable to meet on his/her own and that care partners lack the knowledge or ability to meet. As care partners become increasingly involved as surrogate decision-makers for a PWD, the quality of life for a PWD is directly impacted by the decisions made by a surrogate. Several studies have explored agreement between PWDs and surrogate decision-makers regarding various preferences. Results have indicated that discrepancy between a PWD's preferences and those identified by a surrogate decision-maker is common.

According to our conceptual model, such discrepancy may give rise to NPS. Thus, the proposed pilot project directly addresses major gaps in the availability of safe, effective, and accessible strategies to reduce NPS and NPS-related care partner distress by developing and testing a novel educational intervention that directly targets discrepancies regarding everyday preferences. We will randomize 30 dyads comprising people with clinically significant cognitive impairment (mild cognitive impairment or dementia) and their care partners. The dyads will be randomized to either 1) the intervention arm in which there is a clinician-facilitated discussion between the dyad pair about NPS, the unmet needs hypothesis, and areas of discrepancy in everyday preferences and 2) the enhanced usual care arm in which a standardized document describing NPS and the unmet needs hypothesis will be given to the dyad to review. Primary efficacy will be measured by the Neuropsychiatric Inventory brief questionnaire form (NPI-Q), which allows for assessment of both NPS burden as well as burden of caregiver stress. Assessments will be made at baseline, week 4, and week 8.

Clinical Trial Description

n/a

Related Conditions & MeSH terms

• Dementia

• NCT number: NCT03577418
• Study type: Interventional
• Source: Mclean Hospital
• Status: Withdrawn
• Phase: N/A
• Start date: September 2022
• Completion date: September 2025