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Aims: Prospective memory has been long considered a fundamental cognitive ability for optimal medication taking, but the role of prospective memory errors (termed 'slips') in diabetes self‐care is unclear. Our aim was to examine associations between prospective memory and medication taking in adults with Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes mellitus. Methods: Some 901 adults with Type 1 diabetes and 927 with Type 2 diabetes completed a cross‐sectional survey focused on the psychological and behavioural aspects of living with diabetes. Respondents reported whether they had forgotten to take their diabetes medication over the previous 14 days. Results: Twenty‐four per cent (n = 220) of adults with Type 1 diabetes and 23% (n = 211) with Type 2 diabetes reported that they had forgotten their medication at least once over the previous 14 days. This was associated with more prospective memory slips in adults with Type 1 diabetes [odds ratio (OR) 1.09, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.05 to 1.13; P < 0.001] and Type 2 diabetes (OR 1.10, 95% CI 1.05 to 1.15; P < 0.001); and with younger age (both groups), insulin pump use (Type 1 diabetes), insulin treatment (Type 2 diabetes), less frequent blood glucose checks (Type 1 diabetes) and higher HbA1c (Type 1 diabetes). Conclusions: These findings suggest that forgetting medication is relatively common among adults with Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes, and provide preliminary evidence for its relationship with self‐reported prospective memory slips. What's new?: Medication forgetting among adults with diabetes is common and impacts on glycaemic control. Nearly a quarter of adults with diabetes report forgetting medication recently.Medication forgetting was similar for adults with Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes, and was associated with younger age and higher HbA1c.Prospective memory slips were associated with medication forgetting among adults with Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes.Forgetting to take medication was associated with higher self‐reported HbA1c (+7 mmol/mol; +0.6%) among respondents with Type 1 diabetes, which is both statistically and clinically significant.There is potential for prospective memory‐based interventions to support diabetes self‐care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Malnutrition is common in older adults and is associated with high costs and adverse outcomes. The prevalence, predictors and outcomes of malnutrition on admission to hospital are not clear for this population. Design: Prospective Cohort Study. Setting: Six hospital sites (five public, one private). Participants: In total, 606 older adults aged 70+ were included. All elective and acute admissions to any speciality were eligible. Day-case admissions and those moribund on admission were excluded. Measurements: Sociodemographic and clinical data, including nutritional status (Mini-Nutritional Assessment-short form), was collected within 36 hours of admission. Outcome data was collected prospectively on length of stay, in-hospital mortality and new institutionalisation. Results: The mean age was 79.7; 51% were female; 29% were elective admissions; 67% were admitted to a medical specialty. Nutrition scores were available for 602/606; 37% had a 'normal' status, 45% were 'at-risk', and 18% were 'malnourished'. Malnutrition was more common in females, acute admissions, older patients and those who were widowed/separated. Dementia, functional dependency, comorbidity and frailty independently predicted a) malnutrition and b) being at-risk of malnutrition, compared to normal status (p <.001). Malnutrition was associated with outcomes including an increased length of stay (p <.001), new institutionalisation (p =<0.001) and in-hospital mortality (p <.001). Conclusions: These findings support the prioritisation of nutritional screening in clinical practice and public health policy, for all patients ≥70 on admission to hospital, and in particular for people with dementia, increased functional dependency and/or multi-morbidity, and those who are frail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human and animal studies over the last two decades report that nicotine can improve cognitive performance. Prospective memory (PM), the retrieval and implementation of a previously encoded intention, is also improved by pre-administration of nicotine. As with other nicotine effects, however, predicting precisely how and when nicotine improves the processes engaged by PM has proved less straightforward. We present two studies that explore the source of nicotine’s enhancement of PM. Experiment 1 tests for effects of nicotine on preparatory attention (PA) for PM target detection. Experiment 2 asks whether nicotine enhances processing of the perceptual attributes of the PM targets. Young adult non-smokers matched on baseline performance measures received either 1 mg nicotine or matched placebo via nasal spray. Volunteers completed novel PM tasks at 15 min post-administration. Experiment 1 confirmed that pre-administration of nicotine to non-smokers improved detection rate for prospective memory targets presented during an attention-demanding ongoing task. There was no relationship between PM performance and measures of preparatory attention. In experiment 2, salient targets were more likely to be detected than non-salient targets, but nicotine did not confer any additional advantage to salient targets. The present study suggests that nicotinic stimulation does not work to enhance perceptual salience of target stimuli (experiment 2), nor does it work through better deployment of preparatory working attention (experiment 1). An alternative explanation that nicotine promotes PM detection by facilitating disengagement from the ongoing task is suggested as a future line of investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rationale: The present paper asked first whether the cholinergic agonist nicotine improves memory for delayed intentions (prospective memory, ProM) and second whether pharmacological dissociation would support the psychological distinction that is made between strategic (effortful) and automatic (non-effortful) intention activation in prospective memory. Objectives: To use nicotine as a pharmacological tool with which to examine the neurochemical bases of prospective memory and to dissociate strategic from automatic components of ProM retrieval. Methods: In three experiments, minimally deprived (2 h) smokers either smoked or abstained prior to completing a standard prospective memory study. This involved participants in the simultaneous processing of a ProM task and a cover task (ongoing between the setting and the recall of the intention). Here, the ongoing task involved lexical decision (LDT), while the ProM task required a response to pre-specified target items occurring within the LDT stimuli. Variations in task instructions were used to manipulate the processing requirements of the ProM task, the attention allocated to the ProM task and the balance of importance assigned to the ongoing and ProM tasks. Results: In experiment 1, where the ProM processing was automatic, nicotine did not improve ProM accuracy. In experiment 2, where the ProM task involved strategic processing, positive effects of nicotine were observed. In experiment 3, we covaried ProM task instructions, assigned task importance and nicotine conditions. We observed a main effect of nicotine on ProM accuracy, a main effect of task on ProM accuracy and a main effect of assigned task importance on ProM accuracy. There were no interactions between the factors. Conclusions: Employing both direct and indirect manipulations of strategic engagement, we demonstrated nicotine-induced enhancement of performance on the ProM task. The results are consistent with the view that relatively small changes in instruction and in task variables engage strategic processing in a ProM task and that when these conditions stretch cognitive resources, nicotine may significantly improve performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]