CRE Alzheimer
Salamanca

• Videoteca
• Videoteca, Conferencias

Aimee Spector

Global Summit Alzheimer

• Demencias
• Terapias no farmacológicas
• Estimulación cognitiva

Doctora en Psicología Clínica de la Salud en el University College de Londres.

Su exposición gira en torno a las terapias no farmacológicas, y se titula: «Cognitive Stimulation Therapy (CST) for mild to moderate dementia».

Cognitive Stimulation Therapy (CST) is a brief, evidence-based, effective and cost effective intervention for people with mild to moderate dementia. Developed in the UK, it involves 14 sessions (over 7 weeks) and aims to improve cognitive function through themed group activities. Sessions implicitly stimulate skills including memory, executive function and language through tasks such as categorisation, word association and discussion of current affairs. It is built upon several theories including learning theory and brain plasticity; which suggest that appropriate and targeted mental stimulation, for example through building new semantic connections, can lead to the development of new neuronal pathways. Sessions follow a set of guiding principles which include ‘mental stimulation’, ‘new ideas, thoughts and associations’ and ‘opinions rather than facts’. It is now being evaluated and used internationally, see http://www.ucl.ac.uk/international-cognitive-stimulation-therapy This presentation will provide an overview of the CST research programme to date and outline current international CST research and implementation. This includes an initial randomised controlled trial (Spector et al, 2003), which found significant improvements in both cognition and quality of life when comparing CST to usual care (n=201), improvements in cognition similar to those found using Cholinesterase inhibitors and cost-effectiveness. An RCT of the ‘Maintenance CST’ programme (n=236) demonstrated significant long term improvements in quality of life after 6 months, activities of daily at 3 months and cost effectiveness (Orrell et al, 2014; D’Amico et al. 2015). Qualitative interviews (Spector et al, 2011) showed that positive experiences of being in the group were highly valued, with benefits in everyday life including improvements in concentration and alertness.

The recently published results of a trial of Individualised CST (Orrell at al, 2017) will be presented. This trial (n=356) showed that caregiver led CST resulted in significant improvements in the patient–caregiver relationship, although the benefits to cognition and quality of life seen following group CST were not present. These differences will explored and linked to ongoing research, which further explores the mechanisms of action in CST (e.g. Wong et al, 2017).