Past Issues

Positive psychiatry is the science and practice of psychiatry that, seeks to understand
and promote the well-being of patients. For the elderly, positive psychiatry
is to focus on successful aging, psychosocial and behavioral aspects, including
cognitive interventions to enhance positive attributes, and this prevention is also
an important area of the process. Components of successful aging include wellbeing
and a high cognitive function, or maintaining cognitive reserve. When the
elderly come to seek help for their physical, or mental illnesses, clinicians should
also look for their positive strengths, particularly their cognitive reserve. There are
various cognitive interventions for normal elder individuals such as memory training,
training in reasoning and the speed of procession. Meanwhile, for mild cognitive
impairment (MCI) up to Alzheimer’s disease (AD), many approaches of cognitive
interventions should be implemented. Those approaches should be designed
for each particular patient, and include cognitive stimulation, cognitive training,
cognitive rehabilitation, and multicomponent cognitive intervention. In this overview,
the authors attempted to review all kinds of cognitive interventions to enhance
cognitive function in the elderly, along with patients with MCI or AD. Although
pathological degenerative in brain, or the brain reserve is hard to avoid,
maintaining cognitive functions or retaining cognitive reserve as close to the previous
level may be possible. Cognitive stimulating activities have been suggested
as one of the major contributing factors for cognitive reserve, which interacts with
several other factors, and eventually leads to successful aging.