Living Well with Mild Cognitive Impairment: Social factors and the role of personal and social identity

Abstract

A diagnosis of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) can result in ambiguity and may threaten an individual’s quality of life (QoL), well-being and life satisfaction. As the population ages, more people will be living with MCI. Given the lack of treatment options, it has become important to answer the question of how to “live well” with the condition. We propose that personal and social identity may play an important role alongside social factors such as social engagement and loneliness in the ability of individuals to live well with MCI. To explore this hypothesised relationship, we investigated these constructs in 33 individuals with MCI as well as 19 cognitive normal matched controls. The results indicated that there was no significant reduction in living well indicators in MCI compared to the control group. There was also no evidence of impaired social identity or quantity of social engagement in this group. However, a significant reduction was found in the quality and quantity of friend relationships for the MCI group compared to the control group. Personal identity measures were found to predict living well indicators for both groups but with different aspects of identity influential for each of the groups. Social loneliness was found to be a consistent key predictor of living well indicators in the MCI group, along with measures of social identity and quality and quantity of social engagement. These relationships were not seen as clearly in the control group, with emotional loneliness a more critical predictor for this group. This signals the importance of mitigating social loneliness in particular, alongside the maintenance of personal and social identity, and quality social engagement for living well with MCI.