Project description
Preventing dementia in the early stages of development
Dementia, the most severe expression of cognitive impairment, currently affects nearly 50 million individuals worldwide. It has been shown that non-pharmacological interventions seem to have a positive impact on the onset of cognitive decline and dementia related risk factors. The EU-funded LETHE project aims to provide a data-driven risk factor prediction model for older individuals at risk of cognitive decline building upon big data analysis of observational and longitudinal intervention datasets from four European clinical centres. It will establish novel digital biomarkers for early detection of risk factors based on unobtrusive ICT-based passive and active monitoring. The aim of the project is a digital ICT-based preventive lifestyle intervention through individualised profiling, personalised recommendations, feedback and support.
Objective
As the world's population increases in age, the number of people living with dementia grows. Dementia has long been considered to be neither preventable nor treatable, but while the underlying illnesses are not curable, today we know that the disease course might be modifiable with good preventive interventions at an early time point. The Finnish Geriatric Intervention Study to Prevent Cognitive Impairment and Disability (FINGER) showed a positive effect after a 2-year intervention targeting several lifestyles and vascular risk factors simultaneously. LETHE will go beyond and provide a data-driven risk factor prediction model for older individuals at risk of cognitive decline building upon big data analysis of cross-sectional observational and longitudinal intervention datasets from 4 clinical centers in Europe including the 11- years analysis of FINGER. LETHE will establish novel digital biomarkers, for early detection of risk factors, based on unobtrusive ICT-based passive and active monitoring. The aim is to establish a digital-enabled intervention for cognitive decline prevention based on the evolution of a successful protocol (FINGER) evolving into an ICT based preventive lifestyle intervention through individualized profiling, personalized recommendations, feedback and support (FINGER 2.0) well targeted on a population stratified by cost-effective biological biomarkers. The LETHE solution will be tested in a feasibility study validating the achieved improvements. A successful LETHE project could lead to a more personalized risk factor prevention for persons with beginning cognitive decline, thereby empowering people to an active and healthy lifestyle. Expansions of prevention trials on large scale by an automatized roll out of a multimodal intervention approach, reaching out to large populations, could save future costs on expensive traditional interventions and confer benefits for the wider society.
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Funding Scheme
RIA - Research and Innovation actionCoordinator
8020 Graz
Austria