Managing Stress and Cognitive Difficulties With a Short Mindfulness-based Intervention in Old Adults With Subjective Cognitive Complaints

20 old adults with subjective cognitive complaints will be recruited from adult day centres and the Chelsea Westminster Hospital in London. All patients will be aged 65 and above. Each participant will be randomly allocated to either a mindfulness intervention or the active control condition (psychoeducation) with 10 participants in each intervention.

A short mindfulness intervention of 4 weeks will be delivered by a trained mindfulness teacher across four 2 hour sessions that focus on the breath, links between mind and body, sensory and metacognitive awareness, emotion regulation, movement and compassion using visually engaging materials that will enhance understanding, encoding and recollection.

There will be one session per week. The proposed study will evaluate the effects of a short mindfulness intervention in old adults with subjective cognitive complaints. Management of emotional difficulties associated with anxiety and stress can improve psychological well-being in sufferers, and in turn can enhance cognitive capacity to maximise function. Mindfulness interventions are gentle, non-invasive and cost effective techniques that have been designed for stress reduction, that have been associated with improvements in mood, stress, pain management and overall well-being in a range of clinical and healthy populations. In addition mindfulness interventions have also been shown to improve cognitive function and emotion regulation by enhancing attentional awareness, attentional flexibility and attentional capacity. However, very few studies to date focus on elderly participants and no study to date has tried to shorten the current 8-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction training in older adult populations.

The psycho-education course will also take 4 consecutive weeks, with one session each week.

All participants will be screened (see Appendix 6 of protocol) prior to the beginning of the study and recruited if they fulfil the criteria required as highlighted within the 'participants' section. The screening session will take approximately 20minutes. Written informed consent will be obtained from the participant prior to performing any study related evaluations or procedures. Informed consent (see Appendix 4 of protocol) will be taken during all assessment sessions and also during the screening assessment.