"With progression of MCI, there is increasingly less time spent outside the home, and it’s independent of mood or health status, so it’s not simply because they are depressed or they are sicker," Dr. Kaye noted in an interview at the conference. "It seems to be more intrinsically a part of having MCI. This to us suggests that there is a progressive narrowing of opportunity to interact with the outside world."
The community withdrawal seen in the MCI group might occur for several reasons. "One of the highest suspicions is that as you develop increasing difficulty with your memory and thinking, you become less confident and more apprehensive about interacting with other people," he proposed. "There may also be just the practical forgetting of appointments and just not attending to things that they would usually be doing. So they are just not remembering to remember."
The participants with MCI were unaware of the change in their activity, according to Dr. Kaye. "We asked them on an annual basis about their activities, and this is very subtle. They don’t actually see this, at least using a sort of subjectively reported series of questions that were asked about their participation in clubs, classes, and social events, and going out to eat, things like that."
By enabling more accurate assessment of time spent outside the home, the technology used could have implications for both clinical care and research.
"For those of us interested in trying to get more real-time measurement of activity and behavior, we think that this kind of measure can be used to unobtrusively assess very early activity changes that may be indicative of evolving MCI," he explained. "It would be much more meaningful, rather than saying, ‘I remembered one more animal on that memory test’ [to instead say,] ‘I actually had two more outings a day or spent 20 minutes outside more often than I did previously, on this treatment.’ "
None of the investigators had relevant conflicts of interest.