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Contact: Dr Hannah Keage
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Background
Researching avenues for the prevention of dementia is a global priority. Accordingly, there has been much research on the prevalence and incidence of dementia and its subtypes in the population. The few studies that have examined the neuropathological basis of dementing disorders have found that in a substantial proportion of cases neuropathological measures are neither necessary nor sufficient to explain dementia.
These results raise many questions.
- At a methodological epidemiological level, it calls into question the role of different diagnostic methods and hence the ‘true’ prevalence of dementia, which remains a syndromal diagnosis.
- At a public health level, this finding indicates that life factors enable individuals to cognitively cope from the effects of neuropathological burden.
- Finally, at a psychological level, this finding calls for the investigation of how particular life factors and neuropathological markers interact to bring about the clinical expression of dementia.
These questions drove the establishment of the EClipSE study. It is hoped that results from the EClipSE study will improve our understanding of the biological substrates of dementia and which factors may be protective or increase risk.
Previous studies have not been able to investigate fully these questions, due to a lack of power in undemented samples. Although specific cohorts have been investigated, the extrapolation of results from such research to the broader population is inevitably limited.
The EClipSE database is composed of data from three existing European prospective population-based cohort studies. There are only six studies in the world employing such a design. All three studies that form EClipSE had a voluntary brain donation program, allowing relationships between life factors and neuropathological markers to be investigated. The breadth of the EClipSE database, both in terms of the measures collected and the numbers of participants who donated to the brain collections, will enable the investigation of research questions that have previously not been possible, and should provide more robust neuropathological estimates than previous attempts.