People with dementia and their family carers may benefit from non-pharmacological interventions, including mind-body MB- practices, which can improve physical and mental health by inducing relaxation. This systematic review provides an overview of availability and effects of MB-practices. Selection of included articles, data extraction and methodological quality assessments were conducted by two researchers.
Traditional Chinese Medicine TCM and touch interventions for people with dementia, and meditations for family carers resulted in improvements in respectively cognition and neuropsychiatric symptoms, and mental health. Lack of evidence for other MB-practices is related to small numbers of studies, fragmented use of outcome measures and mixed findings. MB-practices showed promising results.
We recommend implementation and further research of TCM- and touch interventions for people with dementia as well as meditations for family carers. We suggest a cross-over of the promising results of one group to be studied in the other group. Dementia is an umbrella term for a variety of neurocognitive syndromes characterized by progressive cognitive impairment neurodegeneration and co-occurring changes in physical functioning, mood, activities of daily living ADL and social life [ 1 ].
The World Health Organization describes that 55 million people live with dementia worldwide with an incidence of 10 million cases per year [ 2 ]. In , family carers i. Thus, dementia has a large impact on communities, societies, the people who have it and their family carers.
Receiving a dementia diagnosis is stressful [ 6 , 7 ]. People with dementia have reduced abilities to express experienced stress as well as limited strategies to cope with stressful situations. Stress and communication difficulties are risk factors for challenging behaviour in dementia [ 8 ]. Challenging behaviour negatively impacts quality of life, increases the burden on carers [ 10 , 11 ], and is frequently the reason for admission to nursing homes [ 10 ].
