Online Tool To Assess Dementia Risk

UNSW Sydney and Neuroscience Research Australia (NeuRA) researchers have created and tested a method for measuring dementia risk, with encouraging preliminary results.
Over 55 million people worldwide are already living with dementia, with that figure expected to rise to 78 million by 2030, and the focus of dementia research is progressively shifting toward prevention.
The online assessment takes about 20 minutes to complete and offers individuals a customized dementia risk report to discuss with their doctor.
Since inventing the risk tool, known as CogDRisk, in 2022, the team has been analyzing its success by trialing it on four existing datasets, with the results being published in The Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease Prevention.

According to their findings, CogDrisk is effective in predicting dementia risk.

“There’s lots of information about the risk factors for dementia in the academic literature,” says Professor Kaarin Anstey from UNSW’s School of Psychology and NeuRA.

“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.”

Unsuccessful clinical trials for dementia treatment have led to urgent calls for dementia prevention.

“Prevention is now recognized by the World Health Organization as one of the key areas of research. Alzheimer’s Disease International and most of the National Dementia action plans include dementia risk reduction,” says Prof. Anstey.

However, while there is numerous of research on risk factors for dementia all over the world, there isn’t always unanimity on what those risk factors are. To solve this issue, the team combined all of the risk factors identified in the current literature using statistical approaches.

“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,” says Prof. Anstey.

Some of the key modifiable risk factors that increase someone’s risk of dementia include insufficient physical activity, obesity in middle age, high blood pressure in middle age, smoking, and poor diet. “That whole process took several years, we published the review, and then we had to develop the risk assessment tool itself.”

Risk assessment methods are frequently designed on a single cohort and so match a specific dataset and demographic, which does not perform well when applied to other populations.

This study looked at four separate cohorts from current medical studies, each with a different demographic and a total of more than 9500 patients.

The cohort data was matched against the primary risk and protective factors assessed in the CogDrisk tool, such as diabetes, depression, and insomnia, as well as information on nutrition and eating habits, and physical activity levels.

The researchers were subsequently able to link these to a database of dementia cases that emerged within the same cohort.

“Our statistical analysis shows it’s a very robust and generalizable tool,” says Prof. Anstey. “It works across different countries and different data sets. And it’s also quite comprehensive, it includes a lot of the newer risk factors that weren’t previously included.”

Predicting dementia is more difficult than predicting some other diseases, partly because it progresses over two or three decades and there can be a strong genetic component.

“It’s a multi-causal disease. But there are some modifiable risk factors. Most people want to know what their risk factors are and want to do something about them once they know,” says Prof Anstey. The team who developed the tool is hoping that it can be used in healthcare settings to make it easier for GPs and patients to get information on risk reduction.

“Not only are there lots of risk factors, but dementia itself is very complex, and GPs are very busy. So we’re trying to develop ways of making it easier for the public and GPs to get the right information.”

Next, Prof. Anstey is looking to translate the online tool into different languages, so it’s accessible to more people. “And we’re also looking at developing a short form of the tool. So there’s a lot of happening in the research translation, as well as language translation space that we’re working on.”

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