gms | German Medical Science

Background/research question: Patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) have an elevated risk of developing dementia and burden of disease may be substantially reduced by delaying its onset. Whilst the positive effects of exercise on preventing dementia are well reported for healthy older populations, such evidence is more scarce for patients with MCI, especially regarding important long-term effects. The aim of this project is to systematically review the literature to assess the effectiveness of exercise interventions to improve long-term patient-relevant cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes in patients with MCI.

Methods: We systematically searched five electronic databases from 1995 onwards to identify trials reporting on the effectiveness of exercise interventions to improve long-term (12 months+) patient-relevant cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes in adults (50+ years) with MCI (all causes). Two independent reviewers have been involved in selecting and extracting data to present evidence in terms of study/ population/ intervention/ comparator characteristics and long-term patient-relevant cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes. The risk of bias (RoB) will be independently assessed by two reviewers using the Cochrane RoB 2.0 tool. Additionally, the reporting quality of the exercise interventions will be assessed using the Consensus on Exercise Reporting Template (CERT). A meta-analysis will only be conducted if studies are homogeneous enough for effect sizes to be pooled. Where quantitative analysis is not applicable, data will be represented in tabular form and synthesized narratively.

Preliminary/expected results, outlook: To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systematic review to evaluate long-term patient-relevant, cognitive and non-cognitive effects of exercise interventions in MCI populations. The datasets generated during the study will be available in the Zenodo repository (10.5281/zenodo.5589277) with open access. Patients will be involved in defining outcome measures most relevant to them. The results of this work will be disseminated to both scientific and lay audiences by creating a patient-friendly video abstract. This work will inform professionals in primary care about the effectiveness of exercise interventions and facilitate the translation from those research findings with a good reporting standard of sports intervention details into evidence-based exercise recommendations for patients with MCI.

Competing interests: The authors declare no conflict of interest. The funders had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript, or in the decision to publish the results.