Aim and Background: The world is aging. The increase of lifetime and number of elderly people causes some concerns about the future and inevitable problems that will exist for this particular period of time. Alzheimer is a progressive disease, which reaches more advanced stages in case of non-intervention. Some of the methods including physical and mental activities have shown that they can be effective in preventing and slowing disease progression. The objective of this study is also verifying the effect of physical activities on the memory function level of the 50-70 year-old-women who are affected by memory impairment.
Materials and Methods: 16 female subjects (mean age 61/1 ± 6/5) with MCI = 0.5 (mild cognitive impairment), illiterate, healthy (Based on the medical view for participation in physical activities) and without regular physical activities in Tehranelderly nursing home were selected. The randomly practices intervening: experimental group was thephysical activities and the control group (control) wasthe one without any activities. (Each group consisted of eight persons). Duration of intervening was three months, three sessions per week and each session lasted 60 minutes. For the diagnosis of dementia, the Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) was used. Also in order to control the depression level, before and after implementation of the plan, the Geriatric Dementia Scale (GDS) was carried out. To evaluate the data,paired t-test, ANCOVA analysis method and the Bonferroni post hoc were used.
Results: The results indicated that intervening method(physical exercise) had significanteffect onthe memory impairment in increasing the memory level of the 50-70 year-old-women with MCI. Being affected for subscales was the memory subscale. In this consideration, no changes were observed in the depression level and then the level of depression has not interfered in the function level of the participators.
Conclusions: In this study, interventional procedure including physicalexercise caused an improvement in the memory of 50-70-year-old women with mild cognitive impairment. Therefore, doing the physical performance in patients with mild cognitive impairment is effective.
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