Background: Recent evidence suggests that speech substantially changes in ageing. As a complex neurophysiological process, it can accurately reflect changes in the motor and cognitive systems underpinning human speech. Since healthy ageing is not always easily discriminable from early stages of dementia based on cognitive and behavioural…

This paper demonstrates the effects of education on cognitive functioning which could serve as an alternative preventive method to halt or delay cognitive decline in older adults. The purpose of this proposal is to discuss and illustrate the benefits of improving cognitive ability through continuing education. As such, taking advantage of…

This case study describes an art therapy intervention with a client diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease who was coping with grief. The course of fifteen sessions included three phases: body awareness, grief emotions, and grief acceptance. The positive changes parallel ways that art therapy can benefit older adults by promoting communication,…

Equating of psychometric scales and tests is frequently required and conducted in educational, behavioral, and clinical research. Construct comparability or equivalence between measuring instruments is a necessary condition for making decisions about linking and equating resulting scores. This article is concerned with a widely applicable method…

The number of people diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease (AD), a progressive and terminal kind of dementia, continues to rise with an estimated 14 million Americans affected by 2050. Prior to an AD diagnosis, many individuals are diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and have similar, but less severe, symptoms as those with AD. A common…

Objectives: Certain heart conditions and diseases are common in Down syndrome (DS; trisomy 21), but their role in early onset dementia that is prevalent in older adults with DS has not been evaluated. To address this knowledge gap, we conducted a study of risk factors for low neurocognitive/behavioral scores obtained with a published dementia test…

This article considers how intergenerational arts can help support the resilience of people living with dementia. Theorising a moment of process from Magic Me's "Reflections of Stepney," it analyses how art facilitators help a child and care home resident to overcome the challenge of relating and create a performance together. It…

Purpose: Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) and the amnestic variant of Alzheimer's disease (AD) are neurodegenerative conditions characterized by a profound loss of functional communication abilities. Communicative impairment in AD and PPA is especially apparent in the domain of naming common objects and familiar faces. We evaluated the…

Research has shown that animal-assisted activities have specific benefits for older adults, such as decreasing loneliness (Banks & Banks, 2002; Banks, Willoughby, & Banks, 2008; Calvert, 1989) and depression (Grubbs, Artese, Schmitt, Cormier, & Panton, 2016; Le Roux & Kemp, 2009; Moretti et al., 2010) while increasing positive…

Purpose: Speech perception in noise becomes difficult with age but can be facilitated by audiovisual (AV) speech cues and sentence context in healthy older adults. However, individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD) may present with deficits in AV integration, potentially limiting the extent to which they can benefit from AV cues. This study…

Although individual and group art therapy is beneficial for individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD), progression of the disease negatively affects visual processing, which suggests the need to modify art-based interventions. This case study (N = 1) used a psychological well-being scale to compare nonmodified art therapy for an individual with…

This teaching note delineates seven lessons learned when designing and implementing a graduate-level dementia caregiving service-learning course. The course was designed during a 1-year faculty service-learning fellowship and implemented during the summer of 2015. The course used a person-in-environment framework to explain social work practice…

While cognitive changes in aging and neurodegenerative disease have been widely studied, language changes in these populations are less well understood. Inflecting novel words in a language with complex inflectional paradigms provides a good opportunity to observe how language processes change in normal and abnormal aging. Studies of language…

Most tasks test memory within the same day, however, most forgetting occurs after 24 h. Further, testing memory for simple words or objects does not mimic real-world memory experiences. We designed a memory task showing participants video clips of everyday kinds of experiences, including positive, negative, and neutral stimuli, and tested memory…

Primary care physicians play a central role in the process of providing a timely diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Recent reviews reported that their lack of knowledge and stigmatic beliefs about the disease are important barriers to providing an adequate diagnosis and even affect physicians' referral recommendations for help-seeking (HS).…