Mild Cognitive Impairment

An estimated 10 to 20% of people age 65 or older with MCI develop dementia over a one-year period. What is dementia? Dementia is a condition in which you lose your cognitive functioning — thinking, remembering and reasoning — to such an extent that it directly affects your life and daily activities. Now that we know the severity of mild cognitive impairment, let’s move on to the next question:

What is Mild Cognitive Impairment?

Mild Cognitive Impairment is a condition in which a person loses cognitive abilities on a smaller scale (unlike dementia) and symptoms are not severe enough to directly affect your day to day life. This minor decline in abilities is noticeable by the person facing this condition or by people who interact with that person regularly.

It is estimated that between 5 and 20% of people aged over 65 have MCI. Although MCI is not a type of dementia, those who have it are more likely to develop dementia later in life.

MCI can develop for multiple reasons. The risk of developing Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) increases with age and conditions like depression, stroke and diabetes may also contribute to the development of MCI.

How to differentiate between Mild Cognitive Impairment and decline due to normal ageing?

A gradual decline in cognitive abilities is also seen as a person gets older. For example, the ability to learn new information may reduce and the speed of processing information may also decrease. However, this decline in abilities due to normal ageing does not affect a person’s daily life that much. Recognition, intellect, and long-term memory are unaffected by normal ageing.

In the case of normal ageing, a person may occasionally forget names, fumble upon words or misplace things. But this does not happen as often as in the case of a person experiencing MCI. A person with MCI frequently forgets information that an ordinary person would not do.

Symptoms of Mild Cognitive Impairment

Mild cognitive impairment is classified by experts according to the thinking skills that are affected:

Amnestic MCI: MCI that predominantly affects memory. A person may start to forget crucial information, such as appointments, conversations, or recent events, that he or she would normally recall effortlessly.
Nonamnestic MCI: MCI that affects thinking abilities other than memory, such as decision-making, estimating the time or sequence of steps required to perform a complicated task or visual perception.
Attention loss: Focus is lost and a person is vulnerable to becoming distracted.

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What Causes Mild Cognitive Impairment?

There are a lot of factors that can contribute to the development of Mild Cognitive Impairment. Some of them are mentioned below:

Depression, stress, and anxiety
Thyroid, kidney or liver problems
Sleep disorders
Conditions like stroke and diabetes
Conditions that affect blood flow in the brain
Low vitamin B12 levels or other nutrient levels
An infection
Side effects of certain prescription or illegal drugs
History of alcoholism
Genetic factors may also play a role in who develops MCI, much as they do in Alzheimer's and related dementias, according to research. Researchers are trying to figure out why some people with MCI get Alzheimer's disease while others do not.

Note: Most of these causes of MCI are treatable