Assistant Professor Borame Sue Lee Dickens | National University Singapore (NUS); A/Prof Alex Cook | NI; Dr Tan Ken Wei | NUS
Competition Sponsor: Ministry of Health and National Research Foundation of Singapore
Awardee year: 2022
The aim of this study is to create an individual based model designed to test the efficacy of interventions which reduce frailty among older individuals, including resistance-based exercise, nutrition supplementation and hormone supplementation, which can allow for small scale studies to be tested at a national scale to ascertain health burden savings. The model utilises censuses and clinical cohort data to establish risk factors and scale up estimations for the whole population. At the base, we already have a model framework called DEMOS, which operates as a synthetic yet realistic representation of Singapore’s population in terms of its sociodemographics, epidemiology, behaviour and environmental heterogeneities. We will build on this to incorporate frailty with a greater focus on the wellbeing of the older population where different suites of interventions will be applied. Similar efforts have been conducted for other public health problems spanning both the infectious and chronic disease domains, exploring the effects of interventions at a national scale. The project is therefore feasible and able to be successfully carried out as the core team members have a wealth of experience in the creation of such individual based models. The scientific merits of this project are in its novelty, as individual based modelling with frailty interventions have not yet been carried out for an ageing population, and its potential to be carried out for more ageing related illnesses and in other locations outside of Singapore.