Vinciane Wojtasik

Gait analysis in elderly adult patients with mild cognitive impairment and patients with mild Alzheimer’s disease: simple versus dual task: a preliminary report

Background/Aims:  The aim of this study was to assess gait characteristics during simple and dual task in patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and compare them with those of healthy elderly subjects and mild Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients.

A grid for a precise analysis of daily activities

Assessment of daily living activities is essential in patients with Alzheimers disease. Most current tools quantitatively assess overall ability but provide little qualitative information on individual difficulties. Only a few tools allow therapists to evaluate stereotyped activities and record different types of errors. We capitalised on the Kitchen Activity Assessment to design a widely applicable analysis grid that provides both qualitative and quantitative data on activity performance. A cooking activity was videotaped in 15 patients with dementia and assessed according to the different steps in the execution of the task. The evaluations obtained with our grid showed good correlations between raters, between versions of the grid and between sessions. Moreover, the degree of independence obtained with our analysis of the task correlated with the Kitchen Activity Assessment score and with a global score of cognitive functioning. We conclude that assessment of a daily living activity with this analysis grid is reproducible and relatively independent of the therapist, and thus provides quantitative and qualitative information useful for both evaluating and caring for demented patients.

P-331: Baseline characteristics of a two-year prospective study aiming to link clinical components, cognitive and gait performances in healthy old people

Conclusions: To the best of our knowledge this is the first study that presents data on the relationship between smoking and life satisfaction of older people in EU countries living independently. Non-smoking older people report a higher level of life satisfaction compared to smoking older people. The relation between smoking behaviour, diseases, disabilities and life satisfaction is complicated because smoking is related to diseases with a high mortality rate and sometimes a relatively short period with disabilities before death.