Epidemiology of cognitive impairment in older Canadians

Cognitive impairment is an important and growing problem that faces older Canadians. Amongst the challenges of addressing that problem is the need to understand the big picture of what is meant by cognitive impairment, what types of cognitive impairment exist, how they are best described, and what factors are associated with them. Over time, ideas about how to classify cognitive impairment change, and as they do, there is need to re-examine what we think we know in light of the new ideas. The objectives of this grant are to re-evaluate some of our ides about types of cognitive impairment, and to see how these new ideas, if they stack up, might change the way we think about its causes. Often this process works the other way round too: as we get a better understanding of causes, we need to re-evaluate types. Working with two large Canadian datasets, the investigators plan to address several questions, including how cognitive impairment is related to factors such as high blood pressure and high cholesterol, as well as factors such as social relationships, whether people with memory complaints can be distinguished by factors that predict who is likely to progress to dementia and whether some of these factors might be preventable with existing drugs. The investigators also plan to tackle the issue of whether some types of dementia might be underdiagnosed, whether apparent underdiagnosis might give insight into better ways to classify the causes of dementia. By working with existing large datasets, this grant hopes to be able to suggest answers to these questions relatively quickly, and in a cost-effective way.