A New Approach to Dementia
1. With over 100 years of research, significant disease modifying treatments for dementia have not been found
2.Dementia is much more complex than other medical conditions due to slow onset over many years, difficulties making the diagnosis and the difficulty of making model systems.
3.I feel it is now the time to take a new approach with:
A. Large scale partnerships between academics, companies, govermental authorities working together with the general public.
B. The current model of individual research groups has not been successful as the amount of data that can be collected and ideas that can be tested is necessarily limited. Opening coordinated research opportunities to a wider group will be essential.
4. The paper attached below provides some specific Challenges to the the field. It is meant to foster discussion.
5. Please feel free to share the paper and to provide ideas regarding implementation or significant problems
Diet and Dementia
Only with large amounts of data and detailed data regarding food intake will bwe succeed in unravelling these connections.
There is conflicting information on the relationship between diet and dementia. Thepurposes of this pilot study were twofold. First, to use publicly available data regardingfood consumption (United Kingdom Family Food), dementia, risk and demographicfactors to find relationships between the consumption of various foods to dementiaprevalence. The second purpose was to identify elements of study design that hadimportant effects on the results. Multiple analyses were performed on different datasets derived from the existing data. Statistical testing began with univariate correlationanalyses corrected for multiple testing followed by global tests for significance.Subsequently, a number of multivariate techniques were applied including stepwiselinear regression, cluster regression, regularized regression, and principal componentsanalysis. Permutation tests and simulations highlighted the strength and weakness ofeach technique. The univariate analyses demonstrated that the consumption of certainfoods was highly associated with the prevalence of dementia. However, because ofthe complexity of the data set and the high degree of correlation between variables,different multivariate analyses yielded different results, explainable by the correlations.Some factors identified as having potential associations were the consumption of rice,sugar, fruit, potatoes, meat products and fish. However, within a given dietary categorythere were often a number of different elements with different relations to dementia. Thispilot study demonstrates some critical elements for a future study: (1) dietary factorsmust be very narrowly defined, (2) large numbers of cases are needed to supportmultivariable analyses. (3) Multiple statistical methods along with simulations must beused to confirm results.