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Leslie McDonald-Miszczak, Ph.D. Department of Psychology Western Washington University
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Contact Information: Dept. of Psychology Western Washington University 516 High Street Bellingham, WA USA 98230-9089 Tel 360-650-7943 Fax 360-650-7305 Leslie.McDonald-Miszczak@wwu.edu ____________________________________________ My Class Schedule for 2006-2007 Fall Quarter 2006
Winter Quarter 2007
Spring Quarter 2007
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News from the Seniors' Health, Abilities, and Lifestyles Lab SHALL Studies __________________________________ Update on the Memory Monitoring Project Some Findings Participants ranged in age from 65 to 94 years with a sample average of 77 years. Sixty-two percent of the sample is female and the average number of years of education is 16. Participants reported an average of 3 medical conditions and are taking 4 medications on a regular basis, but reported their health was very good. Older participants reported poorer health, felt less positively about being able to remember to take their medications, and remembered fewer medication instructions from a text than the younger members of the study. Interestingly, age was not significantly correlated with taking the correct number of pills or remembering to take one’s the tic tacs in the right amounts. These results indicate that medication adherence is not simply a memory task, but it involves motivation and beliefs. We were excited to see that adherence to one’s own medication was very high (over 90%), on average. In July, I attended the International Society for the Study of Behavioral Development (ISSBD) meeting in Melbourne Australia in July to report some findings. At this conference, I focused on results from the memory monitor that was filled with tic tacs that you took according to a moderately difficult schedule over a two week period. This was used as a measure of prospective memory (memory for activities to be performed in the future) and is quite unique in the field. I suspect that many of my colleagues will be very interested in the use of medication monitors to track this type of memory. The results indicated that, on average, participants in the study almost perfectly remembered to take the correct number of tic tacs per day (over 90% accuracy). This supports existing research in the field that older adults’ prospective memory is usually very good and even better than younger adults. However, the tic tacs were, on average, taken too closely together. So even though the schedule required the mints be taken 12 or 8 hours apart, participants tended to take them at significantly shorter intervals. We believe this occurred not because of a prospective memory failure, but because mealtimes were routinely used as a memory strategy. Because mealtimes are scheduled more closely than the intervals suggested by the “prescription”, shorter intervals between bottle openings were observed. This raises the question of how memory strategies can adversely affect medication taking – something my research group will examine in upcoming studies. Another aspect of the project involved beliefs about memory and how these might influence medication taking and other adherence-related behaviors. I plan to present some of these research findings at the next annual meeting of the Gerontological Society of America in Dallas TX. I will focus on group responses from a specific questionnaire that was developed in my lab titled “Beliefs Related to Medication Adherence (BERMA) Questionnaire”. On average, beliefs about one’s ability to remember to take medication correlated with many adherence-related behaviors. Some behaviors include memory for the medication instructions and rated likelihood of remembering specific medication instructions. Unlike other memory belief measures published in the literature, the data from our study indicate that such beliefs validly reflect some medication adherence-related abilities. We are also very excited about adoption of this questionnaire in other laboratories around the world. Recently, a colleague in the Netherlands has decided to translate this questionnaire and collect additional information from her patients to see if findings are replicated. We hope we will have good news to report sometime next year.
On the Horizon Thus far, we have interviewed 60 older adults for our project examining the relationship between memory and medication adherence. We will continue to recruit participants, so please ask your friends to contact us if they might be interested in participating. This quarter, we are continuing the project by collecting data from 60 younger adults as a comparison group. We strongly suspect that problems with medication adherence are not just experienced by older adults, but we might find different predictors or problems in different age groups. A future phase of the project will consist of interviews with older adults who have a diagnosed mild cognitive impairment so we can study how impairment affects their memory for taking medications.
Student Involvement An important function of my research program is to provide training opportunities to psychology students at WWU. Past Undergraduate RAs Involved in the Memory Monitoring Project Pictured in the back row are Kelsey Harper, Cate
O’Leary, and Naomi Boyd. In the front row are Satish Ravidran and Della
Plaster.
Undergraduate RAs Sondra Johnson, Nicole Chapin, and Fia Lotsu helped collect data from college students last year.
Please Keep in Touch Please feel free to contact us at WWU or pass along our contact information to friends or family who might be interested in participating in our projects. The research lab telephone number is 650-7951 or you can e-mail Dr. McDonald-Miszczak at Leslie.McDonald-Miszczak@wwu.edu.
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