Spotlight session

Global multidomain lifestyle interventions for dementia prevention: myths and realities

Organisers and Chairs

Chengxuan Qiu, Senior lecturer, and Shireen Sindi, Senior research specialist, Department of Neurobiology, Care Sciences and Society, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden.

Chengxuan Qiu is Associate Professor and University Lecturer in epidemiology at Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden. His research has focused on health in aging, especially brain aging and cognitive health. He is particularly interested in epidemiology of aging and dementia and vascular mechanisms of brain aging and cognitive phenotypes. His research has involved extensive national and international collaboration. Notably, supported by joint grants from the Swedish Research Council and the National Natural Science Foundation of China and in collaboration with Shandong Provincial Hospital in China (Profs Yifeng Du and Yongxiang Wang), he has successfully initiated the Multimodal Interventions to Delay Dementia and Disability in Rural China (MIND-China), which is one of the founding projects of the World-Wide FINGERS Network.

Shireen Sindi is Senior Research Specialist at Karolinska Institutet, Center for Alzheimer Research, and Department of Neurobiology, Care Sciences and Society, and honorary Lecturer at Imperial College London, School of Public Health, at The Ageing Epidemiology (AGE) Research Unit. Her research focuses on modifiable risk factors for dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, such as chronic stress and sleep disturbances as well as sex differences in dementia. She also investigates the underlying biological mechanisms in observational studies (e.g. stress hormones, neuroimaging, biomarkers measured in blood and cerebrospinal fluid) and in multidomain lifestyle interventions (e.g. telomere length). She is Leader of the World-Wide FINGERS International Work Group on Sex and Gender which aims to coordinate and harmonise initiatives to advance these topics within global multidomain interventions.

Content and structure

This session will start by providing a background regarding multidomain lifestyle interventions (including e.g., diet, exercise, cognitive training). The session will be interactive, where participants will be presented with statements regarding the feasibility and outcomes of conducting multidomain lifestyle interventions globally and in settings that differ in cultural and socioeconomic factors. Participants will vote to indicate their perspectives (e.g. myth or reality, true or false), and lectures will present information in mini-lecture format to support the answers to the statements.

 Session participants

• Miia Kivipelto, MD, PhD, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden.
• Francesca Mangialasche, MD, PhD. Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden.
• Tiia Ngandu, MD, PhD, Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, Helsinki, Finland.
• Yongxiang Wang, Shandong Provincial Hospital Affiliated to Shandong First Medical University, Jinan, China.
• Suzana Shahar, PhD, Centre for Healthy Ageing and Wellness (HCARE), Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
• Devinder Kaur Ajit Singh, MD, PhD, Centre for Healthy Ageing and Wellness (HCARE), Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.