NCT03949868

Mindful Attention to Variability in Everyday Memory

Status unknown NA Last updated 26 October 2021

What this trial tests

NA trial testing High Mindfulness in Memory Lapse in 210 participants. Status unknown.

Timeline

30 August 2018

Primary endpoint
31 December 2022

31 December 2022

Quick facts

Lead sponsor	Harvard University
Phase	NA
Status	Status unknown
Study type	INTERVENTIONAL
Allocation	randomized
Design	factorial
Masking	single
Primary purpose	basic science
Enrollment	210
Start date	30 August 2018
Primary completion	31 December 2022
Estimated completion	31 December 2022
Sites	1 location across United States

Drugs / interventions tested

• High Mindfulness
• Low Mindfulness
• Active control — full drug profile →

Conditions studied

• Memory Lapse — all drugs for Memory Lapse →

Sponsor

Harvard University

Who can join

Adults 65 to 80, any sex, with Memory Lapse. Patients with the condition only — healthy volunteers not accepted.

Sponsor's own description

Forgetfulness is a common complaint among middle and older adults, with the vast majority of these complaints not rooted in established causes or diagnoses. The contents of these subjective cognitive complaints (SCC) include difficulty retrieving specific words (e.g., names of people or places), misplacing common items (e.g., keys or eyeglasses), and prospective memory failures (e.g., forgetting appointments and reasons for entering a room). One study found that 54% of people in a sample composed of 15,000 adults over the age of 55 reported that they had some difficulty remembering things over the past year. In the subsample composed of individuals aged 85+, this figure increased to 62%.

While some experiences of forgetting can be partially explained by age-related cognitive decline, problems with retrieval processes can be attributed to a host of other factors including stress and anxiety, lack of sleep, and side effects from medications. Even with all of these other possible aspects at play, older adults tend to attribute everyday instances of forgetting to uncontrollable factors including age. Moreover, while society tends to associate forgetting with the elderly population, young adults also report the experience of forgetting. There is reason to suspect that while older adults tend to experience more instances of forgetting than they did as younger adults, they also pay more attention to instances of forgetting, gathering evidence that they are declining. Every instance of forgetting can confirm that one is in the midst of decline. This process is a type of confirmation bias: Every time an older adult notices an instance of forgetting, he/she confirms that the self fits within the larger negative age stereotype. The present study investigates the Attention to Variability Paradigm. Specifically the participants will pay attention to how memory performance fluctuates throughout the day. Primary outcomes will be memory efficacy beliefs and memory performance on a telephone task.

Publications & conference data

No peer-reviewed publications indexed yet for this trial.