Jinlei Li, PhD | Peking Union Medical College
Competition Sponsor: Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences
Award year: 2021
Cognitive problems of the elderly require urgent attention in the context of population aging. As the transitional state between the cognitive decline of normal aging and that of dementia, mild cognitive impairment (MCI) serves as an important stage for the early intervention and prevention of dementia. Previous work of the applicant has discovered that lifestyle and demographic features play an important role in the risks of dementia, and generally available risk factors can be used to perform risk assessment and prevention of dementia. This study will move the subject matter ahead by building and verifying an MCI risk assessment model. It will also develop a tool to evaluate MCI risks and identify high-risk population, thereby creating conditions for conducting cognitive intervention of high-risk population and for delaying the occurrence and development of dementia. The project will 1) streamline the general risk factors of MCI and their level of significance with MCI ; 2) build models for MCI individual risk assessment of the elderly based on the general risk factors, and validate the model with data of 2,300 people aged at or over 60; and 3) on the basis of the theoretical model, develop a WeChat-based convenient MCI risk assessment tool, which could give out the MCI risk value based on the specific feature indicators entered by the elderly and GPs, identify high-risk population, and put forward suggestions.