Variable Judgments of Decisional Capacity in Cognitively Impaired Research Subjects

Research With Cognitively Impaired Participants.

Illnesses that cause cognitive impairment are a considerable health problem in the United States. These include Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's chorea, cerebrovascular disease, psychiatric disorders, chronic alcoholism, and AIDS dementia complex. Illness associated with cognitive impairment may cause great suffering to the affected patients and their families. Research involving individuals w...

Generalizability in Research with Cognitively Impaired Individuals

Introduction A major challenge in designing technology for users with cognitive impairments is achieving generalizable results. By design, controlled experiments—the gold standard of evaluation in HCI research—remove individual differences through statistical means. While this is appropriate in many situations, when working with special populations, individual differences are often very pronoun...

Measuring decision-making capacity in cognitively impaired individuals.

Cognitive and functional losses are only part of the spectrum of disability experienced by persons with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias. They also experience losses in the ability to make decisions, known as decision-making capacity. Researchers have made substantial progress in developing a model of capacity assessment that rests upon the concept of the 4 decision-making abilities: u...

Issues raised by research using persons suffering from dementia who have impaired decisional capacity.

Assessing capacity to consent for research in cognitively impaired older patients

BACKGROUND The number of clinical trials including older patients, and particularly patients with cognitive impairment, is increasing. While statutory provisions exist to make sure that the capacity to consent is assessed systematically for each patient, many gray areas remain with regard to how this assessment is made or should be made in the routine practice of clinical research. OBJECTIVES...