The Gateway to Global Aging and Longitudinal Aging Study in India – Diagnostic Assessment of Dementia (LASI-DAD) study teams attended the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference (AAIC) in Toronto, Canada, from July 25th to 31st.  This interdisciplinary event featured over 8,000 in-person participants from around the world, sharing research and innovations on dementia research and prevention.

While in Toronto, the LASI-DAD team also held its annual project meeting, bringing together international collaborators to share recent outputs and chart the study’s next steps.

The Gateway and LASI-DAD at AAIC

At AAIC, as part of the featured research session “Harnessing the Power of Collaborative Data Sharing and Research” on Thursday, July 31st, Drystan Phillips (University of Southern California) presented on the Gateway’s work enabling cross-national research on cognitive aging and dementia. His talk highlighted the Gateway's efforts to harmonize cognitive assessment data across international studies; provide access to sensitive linked datasets through the Gateway Data Enclave; and support reproducible, transparent, and policy-relevant research on aging worldwide. The Gateway team also promoted their publicly available, harmonized datasets through a booth in the exhibition hall (pictured below), where they answered questions from over 100 conference attendees and shared information via brochures and promotional items.

During the conference, several LASI-DAD researchers shared findings from their work at the AAIC Featured Research Session, “Risk Factors and Biological Mechanisms for Cognitive Decline and Dementia in India.” Presentations included work on longitudinal changes in cognition, blood-based biomarkers of dementia, associations between genes and biomarkers, MRI-based brain structure, hearing loss and cognition, and the role of multilingualism in cognition. Over 80 conference participants attended the session, where they learned from LASI-DAD collaborators about the newly available Wave 2 data. 

LASI-DAD Project Meeting

The LASI-DAD study team also hosted their annual project meeting in Toronto on July 29th and 30th. The first day featured presentations on the biological processes of aging, such as genetics, epigenetics, and blood-based biomarkers. Highlights included the population genomics work conducted by Priya Moorjani (University of California Berkeley), which was recently published in Cell, and the novel mobile retinal imaging project led by Josh Ehrlich (University of Michigan).

On the second day of the project meeting, focus shifted to the sociobehavioral risk factors of dementia. LASI-DAD collaborators shared results from their analyses of the relationship between cognition and factors such as education, social isolation, indoor air temperature, pollution, and multilingualism. LASI-DAD Principal Investigator Jinkook Lee (University of Southern California) also shared innovations that LASI-DAD plans to implement in Wave 3, including a life history questionnaire, AI-driven natural language processing, verbal autopsy, and wearable mobile sensors.

The LASI-DAD team has made tremendous progress over the past year, and we look forward to continued collaboration in producing high-quality research on aging and dementia in India. Further, we would like to extend our gratitude to those who attended the AAIC session or the LASI-DAD project meeting, both in person and online.