Mild Cognitive Impairment

Professor Kenneth Kosik discusses the relationship between mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer’s disease. MCI is a predictor of Alzheimer's disease.

Clinicians studying Alzheimer’s disease have begun to get very interested in the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s disease. So when you study people that are often getting up in years, and they are tested on formal neuropsychological testing, they don’t always perform perfectly. They don’t perform as well as we know they would have if we had tested them 10 or 20 years earlier. Now they are still performing well in terms of perhaps their jobs, their hobbies, their activities of daily living, all of their lifestyle activities are perfectly okay. But on formal testing there are some deficits, mild deficits, and we call that minimal [or mild] cognitive impairment. It’s an entity that increases one’s risk for Alzheimer’s disease and is really very, very common.