Effects of non-pharmacological therapies for people with mild cognitive impairment. A Bayesian network meta-analysis

To compare the effects of non-pharmacological therapies (NPTs) on improving the cognition of people with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) by performing a Bayesian network meta-analysis (NMA).

We searched eight databases for potentially eligible studies. Physical exercise (PE), cognitive stimulation (CS), cognitive training (CT), cognitive rehabilitation (CR), musical therapy (MT) and multi-domain interventions (MI). Pairwise meta-analyses were performed by estimating the weighted mean differences with 95% confidence interval (CI) for mini-mental state examination. The NMA was undertaken to compare different interventions.

CS, PE, MI, MT and CT may all be effective in improving the cognition of patients with MCI. CR was unable to show a significant efficacy. Our NMA ranking results suggest the effectiveness of the six NPTs to be ranked from best to worst as follows: CS, PE, MI, MT, CT and CR.

NPT has great potential to improve the cognition of the elderly with MCI. CS has the highest probability of being the optimal NPT. However, the result should be interpreted with cautions given the limited number and small samples of included randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in this field, large diversity existing in different study designs and potential risk of bias. Future RCTs with high quality and large sample sizes are required to confirm our results.

NPT, as a whole definition, has great potential to improve the cognition of the elderly with MCI. Our NMA ranking results suggest the effectiveness of the six NPTs to be ranked from best to worst as follows: CS, PE, MI, MT, CT and CR.