CBT -Dementia
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The Alzheimer's Society funded CBT-Dementia project
There are two primary foci for this project:
Project Focus 1
What is the best way to adapt Cognitive Behavioural Therapy to help people with dementia who are also anxious or low in mood?
Project Focus 2
How do common mental health problems relate to memory, and other aspects of cognition in people without dementia?
Project Focus 1
The first focus of this project is to look at the use of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) in reducing symptoms of depression and anxiety in people living with dementia. We have written articles for a lay audience on this work (1, 2, 3).
Specifically, we are interested in whether people living with dementia are able to engage with CBT. ADAPT Lab Director, Dr Josh Stott, discusses this in the video below:
People living with dementia are not commonly seen in psychological therapy services for treatment of depression or anxiety, although it is unclear exactly why this is. ADAPT Lab interviewed some clinicians involved in delivering CBT about their thoughts on seeing people living with dementia. Dr Stott describes what we discovered from these interviews in the video below:
In the video below, Dr Stott summarises his work on adapting CBT for people living with dementia:
We have developed recommendations for the use of CBT in people with dementia. These are summarised in the below video. These recommendations may be particularly useful for clinicians delivering CBT interventions or for anyone with an interest in dementia and mental health
Project Focus 2
The second focus of this project is to test how common mental health problems relate to memory, and other aspects of cognition in people without dementia.
This involves complex statistical analysis of large longitudinal datasets to unpick how mental health relates to cognition over time, what aspects of mental health are important in this relationship and how mental health might interact with other important factors affecting cognition.
This work focusses on PROTECT data and has close parallels with our work in the 1946 British Birth Cohort and MODIFY projects.