It’s yet another acronym senior living and memory care providers should familiarize themselves with: CCT. It stands for computerized cognitive training.
The terminology refers to digital exercise options that older adults living with dementia can use to improve cognitive function or slow down decline. This is usually by stimulating visual, verbal or working memory.
For the most part, those kinds of exercises have been supervised by caregivers or clinicians. Older adults who took on CCT training independently, however, showed equal progress in bolstering their memory, a new study shows.
“Although the supervised approach showed greater effects,” the study authors wrote, “the unsupervised approach can improve verbal memory while allowing users to receive CCT at home without engaging as many healthcare resources.”
The report suggests that those new CCT programs could benefit older adults living independently, but senior living operators also could look to those options as a way to provide dementia interventions while dealing with staffing shortages and limited resources.
Newer CCT programs not only are designed to be conducted without clinical supervision; some make use of virtual reality, the study noted. Overall, the CCT programs reviewed in the study required about one to two hours a week over a period of two weeks to six months.
The researchers did qualify their meta-analysis by suggesting that most of the success stories occurred in older adults who had lower levels of dementia or early-stage Alzheimer’s disease.
Dementia is becoming a major care burden as the number of older adults increases worldwide. In the United States alone, 18% of all assisted living communities now include a specialized dementia care unit, and 11% are devoted to dementia or memory care entirely, according to the National Center for Assisted Living.
The combination of CCT, physical exercise and vitamin D makes for a true triple threat to empower older adults’ cognition, the McKnight’s Clinical Daily reported over the summer.
