Health & Medicine, Australia (Commonwealth Union) – Dementia is not a specific disease but rather a group of symptoms that can be caused by a number of underlying conditions. Dementia can affect memory, thinking, language, and behavior, and it is most commonly seen in older adults.
Memory loss, Difficulty with complex tasks, such as managing finances or planning a trip, Changes in mood and behavior, such as depression, anxiety, or agitation are some of the common symptoms among others, however many of these symptoms can manifest itself with other conditions.
Scientists from the The University of New South Wales (UNSW) together with Neuroscience Research Australia (NeuRA) have produced and assessed a tool that can gage dementia risk, showing positive 1st results.
There are many different types of dementia, each with its own set of symptoms and underlying causes. Some of the most common types of dementia such as Alzheimer’s disease, Vascular dementia, Lewy body dementia and Frontotemporal dementia.
The online tool can be conducted in roughly 20 minutes and gives a personalized dementia risk report that patients can go over with their doctor.
Since the production of the risk tool that is referred to as CogDRisk last year, researchers have been assessing the outcome of the tool, by trialing it with 4 current datasets, with the findings that recently appeared in The Journal of Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease.
The evaluations showed the researchers that CogDrisk is quite capable of predicting dementia.
Professor Kaarin Anstey from the UNSW, School of Psychology as well as NeuRA indicated that there is a large quantity of information related to the risks for dementia in academic literature.
“But there’s a gap between just knowing the risks and actually being able to assess whether or not you have the risk, and then knowing what to do about it. CogDrisk was developed to address this.”
Clinical trials which did not obtain the desired result for dementia treatment have brought about the urgent calls for preventing dementia.
Prof. Anstey further indicated that prevention is presently recognized by the World Health Organization as a key component of research. Alzheimer’s Disease International and most of the National Dementia action plans consist of the lowering of dementia risk.
In spite the many different studies on risk factors for dementia from all over the world, there is not necessarily an agreement every time on what exactly are the risk factors. To tackle this issue, researchers applied statistical methods to bring together all the risk factors cited in the present literature.
“So we did a systematic review, to get all the different risk factors for dementia – those which were robust, and those which were modifiable and could be assessed through a self-report instrument,” added Professor Anstey.
Some of the main modifiable risk factors elevating a person’s risk of dementia have been described as insufficient physical activity, obesity in middle age, hypertension in middle age, smoking, as well as a bad diet.
Researchers also indicated that the risk assessment tools are regularly formed on a single cohort and hence belong to a specific dataset and population, which does not function well when used on other populations.
The study analyzed 4 different cohorts from available medical studies, having variations in demographics with a total of more than 9500 participants.
The cohort data was compared against the key risk as well as protective factors evaluated in the CogDrisk tool, that also consisted of whether individuals have diabetes, depression and insomnia, details regarding their diet and food consumption habits and the amount of physical activity they conducted.
Researchers then had the ability to match these to a record of dementia cases which were produced in the same cohort.
