Current Projects
Since stroke doubles the chances of developing dementia, modifying the common risk factors, enhancing protective factors and discovering new ones for both stroke and dementia can prevent stroke and some dementias in the future. Similar risk factors also underpin heart disease, so that application of our discoveries might also help reduce the burden of heart disease and some retinal and renal conditions.
Main Goal
To pioneer an inclusive, comprehensive, evidence-based approach to dementia prevention by integrating population, environmental, sociodemographic and patient data.
Approach
A strong rationale and the knowledge exist for preventing vascular disease and decreasing the rates of heart disease and stroke. However, our approach will be broader than vascular, including all potential contributions to dementia risk known and to be discovered by our comprehensive, complementary approaches.
The current projects will provide a unique opportunity to access a wide range of psycho-socio-ecological and environmental risk factors.
Ongoing Projects
Project 1
Produce a unique Canada heat map of cognitive impairment, dementia and related conditions
Mapping of annual epidemiological figures of dementia and CVD and their trends during the study period will be compared among provinces. To evaluate provincial patterns, we will identify provinces with high concentrations of dementia and CVD as regions ranking in the top one-third of all provinces (belts). We will apply models to analyze the association between socioeconomic, environmental, and individual factors and areas with the highest and lowest rates of these diseases.
Project 2
Identify and analyze known risk and protective factors and their distribution in relation to cognitive impairment and dementia, and discover new factors through a combination of standard, contextual, hypothesis-free and artificial intelligence methods.
We will calculate the incidence and prevalence of dementia and CVD in all Canadian provinces (except Quebec). We will also compare the trends of dementia and CVD and their outcomes in all provinces across the observation period. Using analytic models, we will assess if the observed provincial differences in the incidence and prevalence of dementia and CVD are due to primarily differences in individual characteristics of their inhabitants or are related to access to health care services or environmental differences.
Project 3
Develop cost-effective models of dementia prevention depending on what the most relevant factors are for a particular jurisdiction.
The cost-effectiveness analysis will evaluate the economic burden and health impact of interventions to modify the risk of cognitive impairment and dementia. Estimating cost and cost-effectiveness requires access to robust individual-level data on use of health system resources, including the use of primary and secondary care services. Using local data sources, we will develop cost of illness and cost- effectiveness models for preventing dementia through modifying risk factors that concomitantly impact dementia and CVD.
