Cognitive training for elderly people without cognitive impairment: an occupational therapy intervention during the COVID-19 pandemic
Keywords:
Occupational Therapy, Cognition, Cognitive Aging, ElderlyAbstract
Objective: In view of the cognitive changes resulting from the normal aging process, this study aimed to compare the performance of routine and cognitive activities, quality of life and depressive symptoms of healthy elderly participants and non-participants of cognitive training applied by occupational therapists. Method: non-randomized clinical trial, matched by allocation into groups, with a quantitative approach of analytical character, longitudinal measured through standardized assessments: Geriatric Depression Scale, Revised-Addenbrooke Cognitive Examination, the Routine Tasks Inventory-Extended, Quality Assessment of life of the World Health Organization WHOQOL (BREF and OLD), and Instrument for the Assessment of Attitudes towards Aging, applied pre and post-intervention. There were 24 sessions, twice a week, lasting 60 minutes each. The intervention was based on the natural cognitive decline of aging, and covered analyzed activities and games. Results: case group (n=10), aged between 62 and 74 years (M=67.50, SD= 3.95): control group (n=11), aged between 61 and 73 years (M=68, SD= 4.12). The effect size calculation (Cohen’s d) revealed a training effect for the following variables: Depressive symptoms (1.12); Cognition: memory (0.82), visual-spatial function (0.55), fluency (0.56), MMSE (1.00) and ACE-R (0.98); Quality of life: sensory functioning (0.61); intimacy (0.51) and physical (0.50). No gain effects were observed for the other variables. Conclusion: the cognitive training was accompanied by an improvement of the participants in part of the standardized assessments, suggesting that the intervention favors the improvement of cognitive functions and quality of life and reduction of depressive symptoms of elderly participants.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2022 Brazilian Journal of Occupational Therapy
![Creative Commons License](http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/4.0/88x31.png)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
The “Statement of Responsibility, Copyright and License Agreement” according to the model below must be signed by all the authors and sent during the article submission.
Statement of Responsibility, Copyright and License Agreement
Submission date:
Paper’s Title:
I, the undersigned, hereby certify that:
I participated in the conception of the paper and make public my responsibility for its content.
- All information concerning any source of funding received for the development of this research has been properly disclosed and made available to the editors during the submission.
- There were no connections or agreements between authors and funding sources that constitute any conflict of interest, potential or apparent, that may affect the results of the research.
- If experiments with human or animal subjects were involved all ethical procedures were followed and approved by an Institutional Review Board and that informed consent has been collected and archived when necessary, and the dissemination of images was authorized and I assume full responsibility for it.
- That the manuscript is original and that the research is not in part nor in whole currently submitted to another periodical, either in print or in an electronic format, nor is any other material of my authorship with substantially similar content so submitted.
- If requested, I will provide and cooperate fully in obtaining and providing data on which this text is based, for the editors’ examination.
- I have read and agreed with the terms of the Open Access and License Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY), available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Authors’ full names and signatures list: