Validation of a Community-Based Approach Toward Personalized Dementia Risk Reduction: The Kimel Family Centre for Brain Health and Wellness

Abstract

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES: The Kimel Family Centre for Brain Health and Wellness is a research-driven community centre testing the efficacy of personalized dementia risk reduction programming on dementia risk and cognition. The objective of this protocol is to validate this approach by following people for two years.

DESIGN/SETTING: Participants will receive a comprehensive dementia risk assessment, including nonmodifiable and modifiable risk factors, from which they will receive a Personalized Dementia Risk Report and Program Strategy, indicating their health conditions increasing and their risk level in five modifiable risk domains: physical activity, brain- healthy eating, cognitive engagement, social connections, and mental wellbeing. Equipped with this information, participants will enroll in programs within the Centre to address their risk factors. Changes to their dementia risk, cognition, and Personalized Program Strategy will be communicated through re-assessments of risk factors every six months (risk and cognition) and every year (comprehensive assessment).

PARTICIPANTS: Participants (n = 450) will be 50 years of age or older, without a diagnosis of dementia, and sufficiently fluent in English to complete the assessments and understand program instructors. One goal is that our participant sample will include people of low income (with fundraising providing free community centre membership), and from various ethno- racial backgrounds.

INTERVENTION: Participants will select programs to meet their Personalized Program Strategy. For physical activity, they will gradually work toward the Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology guidelines. For brain-healthy eating, they will learn about the Brain Health Food Guide and food label reading, and then take additional programs. For cognitive engagement and mental wellbeing, they will take at least one hour of relevant programming per week. Social connections will be reinforced throughout all programs. All participants will also have access to the Canadian Consortium on Neurodegeneration’s CAN- THUMBS Up online, educational program on modifiable dementia risk factors, called Brain Health PRO.

MEASUREMENTS: The comprehensive assessment includes numerous dementia risk factors, but the primary measures are risk in the five domains, health conditions proximal to those five risk domains, and cognition, and how these are affected by adherence and quality of goal-directed future simulation. We hypothesize a reduced risk in the five domains within six months, improvements in health biomarkers within a year, and maintenance of cognition within two years, with these benefits accruing with greater adherence, but only up to a point, at which benefits will plateau, and greater benefits among participants whose goal-directed simulations are more vivid, personally-relevant, achievable, and positive.

CONCLUSIONS: This innovative approach overcomes a number of limitations present in prior multidomain dementia prevention trials. Adapting a preference clinical trial that is embedded in a community centre, where participants have autonomy to choose programs to address their modifiable dementia risk factors, has real-world applicability in the global effort to reduce dementia risk. 

Plain Language Summary

This paper describes our planned protocol for a validation study of the Kimel Family Centre for Brain Health and Wellness, the world’s first research-driven community centre providing personalized dementia risk reduction programming. Participants will receive a detailed dementia risk assessment, which will inform a Personalized Program Strategy to implement in the centre, focusing on five dementia risk domains: physical activity, brain-healthy eating, cognitive engagement, social connections, and mental wellbeing. Dementia risk will be re-assessed every six months, and participants will receive an updated Personalized Program Strategy. For this validation study, we will follow people over two years, to determine the effects of this approach on dementia risk and cognition.