Successful dementia prevention trial expands

One of the world’s most successful trials for delaying or preventing dementia is set to extend, involving GPs among select Primary Health Networks around Australia.
 
The Maintain Your Brain trial, which was co-developed by prominent dementia advocate and current Senior Australian of the Year Professor Henry Brodaty, involved more than 6000 recruits aged 55–77 in New South Wales from 2018–21.
 
An expanded trial will look to recruit around 5000 people aged 45–79 from across Australia over the next five years, with a focus on rural and regional communities. 
 
The original randomised controlled trial included participants with at least two major risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease. Half were given information about dementia, while the other half had a personalised schedule of online coaching covering physical activity, nutrition, cognitive activity as well as depression and anxiety.
 
While the trial resulted in improvements for both groups, it led to ‘significantly better cognition’ over the three-year timespan for the intervention group, according to results published in the Nature Medicine journal last year.
 
It is an outcome proponents have said could be used on a wider scale, which will now be put into place following a $3 million Federal Government grant.
 
It will allow the trial to expand via partnerships with Primary Health Networks, GPs, consumer organisations and community groups across urban, regional and rural Australia.

Dr Marita Long, a GP and honorary medical advisor with Dementia Australia, welcomed the funding’s  focus on prevention.
 
‘In terms of dementia, we know prevention is better than cure and there is no cure at the moment, so prevention is really our best shot,’ she told newsGP.
 
‘If you can get this across a big population of people and see if it has an impact, particularly in a real-world setting, that’s fantastic.
 
‘It is a first step to making a real public health attempt at moderating or modifying risk.’
 
Known as MYB+, the trial will also target additional dementia risk factors including social isolation, cardiovascular health, hearing and vision loss, diabetes and mental health.
 
‘Brain health is just so incredibly important,’ said Dr Long.
 
‘It’s worth saying that the preventative work GPs already do is reducing the incidence of dementia or contributing to the reduction in incidence.
 
‘We address the vascular risk factors for all the heart health we do, but this is encouragement for GPs to extend that further, to incorporate some of those other brain-health risk factors.
 
‘If this gets into the GP’s realm of doing dementia risk reduction, that’s great.’
 
Professor Perminder Sachdev, Co-Director of UNSW Sydney’s Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing, also emphasised the importance of prevention with no known cure for dementia.
 
‘MYB+ represents a scalable, evidence-based approach that could help Australians stay healthier, more independent and socially connected for longer,’ he said.
 
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