People with MCI have much greater difficulty, for example, remembering a fact after a relatively short time. In cognitive testing, people with MCI, after a delay, remember significantly less of a paragraph they have read or details of simple drawings they have seen compared to people with normal memory changes associated with aging. A person with MCI is likely to forget important events repeatedly, while significant information is retained in normal aging. As its name indicates, MCI is a condition of mild impairment, specifically in the area of memory, while dementia is characterized by additional and severe problems in other areas of cognition, such as orientation, language, and attention. While most patients with MCI get worse, not all will.
AD invariably results in a gradual decline, eventually progressing to severe, debilitating dementia.
This is much higher than the 1 percent or so per year in a normal population of people 65 and older. Researchers are examining the possible relationship between the two conditions. However, on other cognitive tests, measuring a person's disorientation and confusion about routine activities, MCI individuals' scores were equivalent to those of healthy people and better than those of AD patients. MCI, therefore, represented a detectable failure in memory in people with otherwise normal cognitive abilities. Before now, evaluating people with MCI has been difficult because researchers have had no agreed upon definition of the symptoms of the condition.