Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) twenty years on

Abstract

Cognitive decline has commonly been considered an inevitable result of brain aging and has been of clinical interest principally because of related difficulties with everyday functioning. Since the 1990s the “normality” of age-related cognitive decline has been called into question, being commonly attributed to a number of underlying disorders. Numerous concepts have been proposed which link subclinical cognitive change to pathological states (mild cognitive disorder, mild neurocognitive disorder, mild cognitive impairment). Of these, mild cognitive impairment (MCI) has become the most popular, driven on the one hand by industrial interests seeking to extend new dementia treatments for a more prevalent subclinical syndrome, and on the other by researchers attempting to identify at-risk populations. MCI has been both criticized for “medicalizing” behavior still within normal limits (Stephan et al., 2008; Moreira et al., 2008) and welcomed in that it suggests cognitive decline with aging may not be inevitable, but rather due to abnormalities which could ultimately be treated. Recently, in both Europe (DuBois et al., 2007) and the USA (Albert et al., 2011), panels of experts have scrutinized the concept of MCI and more broadly the pre-dementia stages of neurodegenerative diseases and offered new research diagnostic criteria. These proposed criteria have highlighted the (potential) value of biomarkers in assisting diagnosis, although some have considered the elevation of biomarkers to this level of importance in diagnosing disease before dementia develops to be premature given both the extent and quality of diagnostic biomarker data currently available (McShane et al., 2011a; 2011b).