Abstract
Mild cognitive impairment previous to Alzheimer's disease: typologies and outcome. Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) refers to an intermediate stage between normality and dementia, especially Alzheimer disease (AD). Three types of MCI have been recently proposed (amnestic, diffuse and focal nonmemory), each of them related to a specific later development. The aim of this paper is to determine the frequency with which these types of MCI occur and which of them is more related to AD. In order to achieve this aim, the patients' level of performance was examined in different neurocognitive tests. One hundred and forty-one patients were included in the study and they were compared to a control group with the same age and sex distribution. The patients' level of performance was significantly lower than the controls' in all the functions under examination, except in the case of spatial orientation where no differences were observed. Regarding the frequency of the three types of MCI, the most frequent one was the diffuse MCI. After a follow up study of 2 years, 15.21% of the patients developed AD. These patients showed greater temporal disorientation and episodic memory disorders than the patients that remained stable. All of them presented a diffuse MCI.
