The Effect of Sleep and Cognition Enhancement Multimodal Intervention for Mild Cognitive Impairment with Sleep Disturbance in the Community-Dwelling Elderly

Dementia prevalence has soared due to population aging. In Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) as a pre-dementia stage, sleep disturbances have raised much interest as a factor in a bidirectional relationship with cognitive decline. Thus, this study developed the Sleep and Cognition Enhancement Multimodal Intervention (SCEMI) based on Lazarus' multimodal approach and conducted a randomized controlled experiment to investigate the effects of the novel program on sleep and cognition in MCI elderly. The participants were 55 MCI elderly with sleep disturbances at two dementia care centers located in S-city, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea (n = 25 in the experimental group and n = 30 in the control group). The study period was from November 01 to December 27, 2022. The experimental group received 8 sessions of SCEMI, 60 min per session once a week. The control group received general education and guidance using a simplified booklet on the sleep and cognitive improvement. For data collection, a self-reported questionnaire was used to investigate sleep quality, presleep arousal, cognitive function, stress, and depression. The results showed that, compared to the control group, the experimental group had significantly improved across all variables: sleep quality (U = 109.50, p < 0.001), presleep arousal (U = 11.50, p < 0.001), cognitive function (U = 72.00, p < 0.001), stress (U = 139.00, p < 0.001), and depression (U = 231.50, p = 0.015). Thus, the SCEMI appears to positively affect symptomatic improvement and delays the progression to dementia as an integrated intervention to enhance sleep and cognition in community-dwelling MCI elderly with sleep disturbances.