My Mother's Journey With Dementia

Mild Cognitive Impairment Brain

I remember when my first family member was diagnosed with Alzheimer, and some of the definitions people used confused me.   One of those definitions I wasn't perfectly clear about was Mild Cognitive Impairment.  I remember hearing that, and saying 'what is mild cognitive impairment'? 

Cognitive pertains to our mental processes of perception, memory, judgment, and of course reasoning. Its our way of processing thought and information.

As we get older most have some cognitive decline, because that is part of the aging process. It may take us a little longer to remember a word, or remember someone's name. We notice forgetfulness may gradually increase. In most cases these changes aren't bad enough to interfere with our normal activities.

On the other hand, mild cognitive impairment is more than just 'forgetfulness'.

Some of the Symptoms of Mild Cognitive Impairment:
You tend to lose your train of thought during conversations with people. You lose the ability to truly keep with the theme of the conversations. For example, you and your friends are talking about the senior bus trip you just got back from. You can't seem to keep up and understand the conversation.



Making decisions, planning things, interpreting instructions make you feel increasingly overwhelmed.

You forget important events, social activities, and realize you are forgetting things more often than not.

Looking around you have trouble finding your way in familiar environments.

People can experience depression, anxiety, impulsiveness, aggression, agitation, irritability, apathy, and the judgment does start to slip.

The last part to me is more than understandable. Why? Life all of a sudden is more than frustrating even in the smallest of areas. You also realize that friends and family are noticing these changes as well. It would make anyone fearful.

These symptoms don't automatically mean Dementia or Alzheimer.  They are looked at as some of the criteria of mild cognitive impairment.

Its important to get the doctor, and do all the recommended battery of tests. It is possible that individuals can remain stable, while others in a small number of cases improve.

Quoted from the Alzheimer Disease center Website:

At present, research shows that a significant number of individuals diagnosed with Mild Cognitive Impairment progress to Alzheimer’s disease. The people who do not progress to AD remain in this stage indefinitely. It is critical for researchers and clinicians to understand why some individuals remain at this stage and why others develop Alzheimer’s disease. It is also extremely important to study the potential causes of symptoms of Mild Cognitive Impairment in order to develop appropriate medical and psychosocial treatments.

If you are interesting in more information I found a mild Cognitive Impairment Information sheet as well.

Its a .pdf file.  I have found with Mozilla Foxfire Browser I can't open it.  If I use my Internet Explorer Browser?  I can!

Anyone else get confused about BIG terms they use?  When I did figure out what mild cognitive impairment was?  I felt kind of silly.  Do they make up these huge medical terms just to confuse us, or maybe just make themselves look smart? (raspberries going out to the medical community!)