The Dunedin Dementia Risk Awareness Survey will survey up to 1800 people and be used to design specific interventions and create educational materials about Alzheimer’s prevention, Associate Prof Yoram Barak, of the University of Otago’s Dunedin School of Medicine, who is leading the study, said.
Prof Barak said the ability of the study to personalise future programmes according to the target population’s brain health awareness would be a "unique advantage" compared with other available programmes, and the study would be one of the largest in scope done in the area of health literacy.
Prof Kate Scott, of the Dunedin School of Medicine, is assisting Prof Barak with the study, which started in January and is at present surveying up to 300 people for its first pilot stage.
The participants are being asked about their lifestyle, knowledge of risk factors for Alzheimer’s and willingness to change lifestyle, with a focus on diet, smoking, weight, controlling blood pressure and loneliness.
The first stage of the study will be completed by late this month, and then a more detailed survey with another 1000 Dunedin people and 500 Southland people will be done in stage two, to be completed by mid-next year.
Specific interventions would be designed from the study, forming the basis of "a dementia primary prevention effort for the benefit of New Zealand adults", Prof Barak said. The entire study was expected to take three to five years, the period of his contract with the Dunedin School of Medicine.
Prof Barak said the surveys would examine knowledge of broader dementia, but the interventions would be designed to prevent Alzheimer’s. He hoped to interest collaborators from other centres in New Zealand once the results were analysed.
Already, significant risk factors for Alzheimer’s had been identified, for example being overweight, eating a lot of red meat, smoking, having diabetes and a lack of social interaction, Prof Barak said.
He said prevention research was vital, as the causes of Alzheimer’s were still not known and no cure could be found until they were.
"Currently, there are 1278 clinical trials listed on [US National Library of Medicine website] ClinicalTrials.gov. They will all fail. In the last 30 years not a single new molecule was approved by the FDA (US Food and Drug Administration) for Alzheimer’s disease. In the period 2001-11 years 1274 trials failed."
The "beauty of prevention" was that even though the risk factors might not be understood — for example no-one knew why those who were overweight and/or smoked had higher rates of dementia — it should be "as simple" as reducing them, for example advising people to maintain healthy weights or stop smoking, Prof Barak said.
"The potential is to use the new methodology to design specific interventions based on what people need to learn about brain health as well as what we need to ‘unlearn’. For example, many people believe smoking ‘helps’ to concentrate — we need to unlearn that. People may not realise that obesity in mid-life adversely affects your memory as you age — we need to teach that."
Prof Barak said New Zealand’s rate of Alzheimer’s was "just like any other Western country" and increasing.
"One in nine people over 65 years of age suffer from dementia. When our grandchildren become elderly, it is predicted that one in three will suffer from dementia. The prevention of dementia, and particularly of Alzheimer’s disease, is a major challenge for researchers and clinicians."
