Project: Personalized aging pattern for early risk detection and prevention of cognitive impairment and dementia in cognitively healthy individuals
| Acronym | Pattern-Cog (Reference Number: ERAPERMED2021-127) |
| Duration | 01/06/2022 - 01/06/2025 |
| Project Topic | The overarching goal of this project is to improve dementia prevention strategies by developing and validating a personalized medicine methodology for the detection of earliest signs of impending cognitive decline and markers, enabling early and personalized multidomain interventions. Effective disease modifying drugs are not yet widely available, but a multidomain lifestyle intervention (FINGER randomized controlled trial, RCT) has been shown to improve cognition and other related outcomes in older adults from the general population with elevated risk of developing dementia. Findings from FINGER and other multidomain lifestyle trials have emphasized that intervention effectiveness may be dependent on methodology that does not yet exist, i.e., accurately identifying at-risk individuals who are most likely to benefit. This project will address this methodological gap by (1) developing methods to predict future cognitive decline based on clinical data and differentiate between healthy individuals at higher risk for mild cognitive impairment and sporadic AD vs. those who remain healthy; and (2) test the methodology in ongoing RCTs for dementia prevention. Instead of a standard machine learning approach, we propose an innovative concept of personalized aging pattern rooted in data from healthy individuals. Specific deviations from the personalized aging pattern will be detected as specific risk factors for the onset of cognitive decline and subsequent dementia. The consortium will utilize multiple data resources, including a large observational healthy-aging study (Vallecas) and 3 prevention RCTs (FINGER, MIND-ADmini, MET-FINGER) based on the successful FINGER multidomain intervention model. The consortium mixes unique expertise from, e.g., machine learning, clinical neuroscience, dementia intervention/prevention, imaging, legal and ethical aspects, to achieve the critical mass. Public involvement activities will be led by Alzheimer Europe. |
| Network | ERA PerMed |
| Call | 4th Joint Transnational Call for Proposals (2021) |
Project partner
| Number | Name | Role | Country |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Itä-Suomen Yliopisto | Coordinator | Finland |
| 2 | Fundación Centro de Investigación de Enfermedades Neurológicas | Partner | Spain |
| 3 | Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin | Partner | Germany |
| 4 | Alzheimer Europe | Partner | Luxembourg |
| 5 | Karolinska Institutet | Partner | Sweden |
| 6 | Jena University Hospital | Partner | Germany |