Assessment service of cognitive symptoms and dementia prevention: The program "cuide da sua memória do CECOM - UNICAMP" [CECOM-UNICAMP's take care of your memory]

Abstract

Currently, a significant increase on the prevalence of dementia was verified, caused by the Alzheimer's disease (AD) and other neurocognitive disorders, progressive, irreversible pathologies, without curative treatments. Therefore, the recent studies' focus is on the identification of people with high risk for dementia, enabling early diagnosis and treatment with the purpose of preventing and/or delaying the dementia installation. The program "Cuide da sua Memória" [Take Care of your Memory] by CECOM-UNICAMP provides the population with memory complaints or other cognitive domains, with the purpose of identifying, following up and treating individuals with pre-demential conditions, preventing the advancement of cognitive loss and the conversion to dementia. The program actions are population education, multidisciplinary diagnosis and follow-up consultations, treatment with multimodal cognitive stimulation in a group, other professional's training and scientific production. The program has specialist physicians, psychologists and nursing team trained in cognitive health. After approximately 1 year of working, lectures were given at Campinas and Limeira campus units, about 200 patients were assessed and most of them are in term follow-up, every 10 weeks, new cognitive simulation groups are open, annual internships are offered to two resident Geriatric Psychiatry physicians and one psychologist and a research group was structured on pre-dementia conditions with five post-graduation projects. It is understood that this program may work as a model to structure other public and private services for cognitive health attention, focused on the dementia prevention.