Marcos Felipe Falcão Sobral

Mild cognitive impairment in the elderly Relationship between communication and functional capacity

Abstract Mild Cognitive Impairment is characterized as an intermediate form between age-related change and dementia. For the elderly, autonomy and independence are related to the ability to remain active in conducting their social activities and, for this to occur, communication is fundamental in this process. Objective: To assess the association between communication and the abilities of elderly people with mild cognitive impairment to perform instrumental activities of daily living. Methods: A cross-sectional, quantitative, analytical, correlational study was conducted at the Open University of the Third Age (UnATI), a program of the Federal University of Pernambuco. This study included 92 people, comprising 46 elderly with mild cognitive impairment and a caregiver or family member who met the inclusion criteria. The elderly were asked to complete a sociodemographic questionnaire and Lawton-Brody’s Instrumental Activities of Daily Living Scale. The caregivers were asked to complete the Functional Assessment of Communication Skills. The following variables were studied: social communication skills and instrumental activities of daily living. Data were stored in an Excel® 2007 spreadsheet, and the Pearson correlation test was used for the statistical analysis. Results: There were statistically significant correlations in four domains of social communication: referring to family members by name (p=0.0033); requesting information about people or events (p=0.0355); understanding conversations in a noisy environment (p=0.0448); and understanding what they watch on television or listen to on the radio (p=0.0127). Conclusion: Changes in the communication of elderly people with mild cognitive impairment interfere with their ability to perform instrumental activities autonomously and independently.

Multicriteria Model to Sort Suppliers in a Brazilian Dairy Industry

This paper describes a real application of a multicriteria decision aid to sort suppliers in the Brazilian dairy industry located in Serra Talhada City. This region is very arid, and farmers have difficulty maintaining the quality required for dairy production. Five criteria were identified by the dairy farmers: production capacity, product quality, cost, transportation and distance from the manufacturing site. The most appropriate method was chosen to sort clients with respect to the preferred structure of the decision maker to obtain the parameters. This study involved eight milk suppliers that were allocated into three ordinated classes. No supplier was allocated into the best class very good, five were considered regular, and three were inadequate. The use of multicriteria modeling enabled the decision maker to establish a new metric to evaluate suppliers while simultaneously considering multiple criteria.