SHARED Fifty million people worldwide have dementia (WHO, 2019). The world’s ageing population presents unprecedented challenges to us. As we age and our memory fades, we may lose confidence and become isolated from our friends and family. Lifestyle may hold the key to modifying dementia risk. The brain has a ‘use it or lose it’ rule and social interactions may help keep our brain healthy. The NHMRC and European Union Joint ProgrammeNeurodegenerative Disease Research funded a project called SHARED, which stands for Social Health And Reserve in the Dementia patient journey to explore this question. Our team at CHeBA are working alongside our partners at Erasmus MC, Radboud UMC, Wroclaw Medical University, Karolinska Institute, Bremen University and University College London to understand how social factors (contacts, support, participation) impact cognitive decline in dementia and vice versa.
We received data from the United States, Puerto Rico, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Germany, Greece, Central African Republic, the Republic of Congo, China, Singapore, South Korea and Australia. The global nature of this project is what sets it apart. We completed a meta-data inventory to catalogue the cognitive, physical and social variables which will enable us to test our hypotheses. We harmonised data from these 12 studies and ran models to test whether social factors distinguished between Mild Cognitive Impairment and people living with dementia. Our preliminary findings suggest that frequent social interactions and having someone to confide in may protect us against dementia risk. In 2021, we plan to explore the trajectories of social factors over the course of dementia and examine the causal links between social and cognitive health.
International data may unlock the secrets of social interactions and brain health. In 2020, the CHeBA team (Suraj Samtani, Ashley Stevens, Darren Lipnicki, Perminder Sachdev and Henry Brodaty) examined data from 12 longitudinal studies of ageing across 6 continents to explore this issue.
Dr Suraj Samtani, Professor Henry Brodaty, Ashley Stevens, Professor Perminder Sachdev
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