Dementia Risk Prediction Model: Development and Validation

At present, there is no treatment for dementia that changes the course of the disease. However, it is now understood that the proteins in dementias such as Alzheimer's disease are present years before someone develops symptoms of dementia. Studies may therefore need to give potential treatments to patients before they develop symptoms of dementia. To do this, researchers need a way of predicting who will go on to develop dementia in the future. There are several ways of doing this, however, many of these methods are costly and difficult to implement at a population level - such as brain imaging, lumbar punctures or psychological tests. In this study, the investigators aim to develop a method of predicting who will go on to develop dementia (and dementia due to Alzheimer's disease) using only the sort of information that a general practitioner would have available to them. To do this, the investigators will develop a dementia prediction model using data from the Secure Anonymised Information Linkage (SAIL) Databank, which contains anonymised primary care, hospital admissions and mortality data for the population of Wales, United Kingdom (UK). They will then go on to test how well it performs in an external dataset, such as the UK's Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD).