Study offers hope for dementia patients
Comprehensive approach aims to develop new treatments
The largest Canadian study ever on dementia launches Wednesday with a goal of developing new interventions to slow or halt diseases that affect more than half a million Canadians.
The clinical study on neurodegenerative diseases is being conducted by the Canadian Consortium on Neurodegeneration in Aging. It will be administered by the consortium’s scientific director Dr. Howard Chertkow, a neurologist at the Jewish General Hospital.
A network of 350 researchers across the country is mobilizing in an attempt to untangle some of the mysteries of age-related brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia.
The goal is to enrol 1,600 participants at 30 sites in Canada to study dementia in all its forms, in the hope of creating strategies for early detection and intervention and improving the lives of those living with dementia.
An estimated 564,000 Canadians live with dementia, but the number is expected to soar to 937,000 by 2031. Left unchecked, one in five people in the country risk developing Alzheimer’s or other types of dementia. Worldwide, the cost of treating dementia is expected to reach $1 trillion by 2018.
“We really have to mobilize and fight this disease, which is such a tragedy and a burden,” Chertkow said in an interview. “This represents the Canadian government realizing it’s time to step up to the plate and create a national dementia strategy.”
Canada is one of the few countries without such a plan, said Yves Joanette, scientific director of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research’s Institute of Aging and chair of the World Dementia Council. That is despite the fact the World Health Organization has identified dementia as a priority. There are more people with dementia than cancer and heart disease combined.
Joanette said he hopes a combination of drugs and behavioural approaches will bring a disease-modifying solution by 2025.
The $8.4-million study is funded by a $31.5-million grant awarded for the creation of the Canadian Consortium on Neurodegeneration in Aging in 2014 by the federal government through the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. It’s a good start, but Chertkow said funding for dementia research in Canada, at 15 cents per person each year, is way below the U.S. level of $4 per person each year.
“We are trying to get Alzheimer’s and dementia on the front burner in terms of policy,” he said. “It’s a political issue of national importance.”
The intersection of an aging population with a higher incidence of dementia and an already overburdened health-care system makes dementia not just a debilitating illness, but an economic challenge.
Chertkow said participants in the Comprehensive Assessment of Neurodegeneration and Dementia study will answer detailed questions about diet, exercise and stress to determine what increases resistance to dementia. Education provides some protection, as does speaking many languages, he said, while stressful events can be a trigger.
“We know exercise is good, but we don’t know how much exercise,” Chertkow said. Researchers want to determine what combinations work best, he said. “We want to be able to say if you do these three or four things, it lowers your risk.”
Participants will undergo clinical, sensory and cognitive tests, an MRI scan, and give samples of blood, saliva, urine and cerebrospinal fluid. The “Olympic team” of researchers will then pool the data, looking at genetics and brain imaging, with the hope of making breakthrough discoveries, Joanette said.