Addressing Global Diversity in Dementia Research with the Cosmic Collaboration

Abstract

The global prevalence of dementia is growing, particularly in low- and middle-income (LMIC) countries. However, evidence for dementia risk factors predominantly comes from high-income countries (HICs) and there is a need to study risk factors more equitably across HICs and LMICs. Cohort Studies of Memory in an International Consortium (COSMIC) brings together cohort studies of cognitive ageing from around the world to study risk factors for dementia in a truly international way. COSMIC has 58 member studies from 38 countries across Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and Central and South America, representing HICs, LMICs, and minority populations within HICs. COSMIC researchers have investigated a wide range of dementia risk factors across the diverse member studies and shown that some factors have different levels of association with dementia in different regions and populations, suggesting that interventions to prevent or delay dementia will require tailoring to optimise the local effect. COSMIC is currently developing methods to reliably assess dementia from limited data in under-resourced regions, producing dementia risk models appropriate for LMICs, and increasing its attention to genetics, biomarkers, and environmental factors across diverse regions and populations. Further, COSMIC is helping to train new researchers in LMICs, and COSMIC members are among the first to be boarded on Dementias Platform Australia, a secure data exchange platform facilitating cohort study data access by researchers anywhere in the world. We invite cohort studies from LMICs or under-studied populations to join COSMIC and help make dementia research as globally representative and collaborative as possible.

Note:
Funding declaration: Funding for COSMIC comes from the National Institute On Aging of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R01AG057531. Perminder S. Sachdev is also funded by a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) investigator grant (APP1196150). Dementias Platform Australia (DPAU) access to the Secure eResearch Platform (SeRP) technology hosted at Monash University was supported by a National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) investment [P20E-058, http://doi.org/10.47486/PL058] from Australian Research Data Commons’ (ARDC) Platforms program (https://ardc.edu.au/program/platforms-program/).

Conflict of Interests: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Keywords: cognitive decline, cohort study, ethnicity, international, LMIC, risk factors