The progressive ageing of the population represents a challenge for our society. Specifically, in the next two decades a strong increase is expected in the number of people over 90 years of age that will specifically affect the cross-border area between Spain and Portugal. Although the studies carried out so far with very old people are scarce and have not yet allowed to define the morphological substratum of the preservation of the physical and cognitive level in the long-lived people, the study of this population group can help to decipher two questions for which there is still no answer. On the one hand, determine which individual factors associated with lifestyle are related to healthy ageing. On the other, to know what risk factors are associated with the appearance of various diseases associated with age and, especially, Alzheimer's type dementia.
PILEP + 90 is a multidisciplinary research program focused on the study of the factors associated with healthy and pathological ageing in a sample of long-lived people. The research program will be led by the CIEN Foundation and will involve researchers from four different institutions in Spain (CIEN Foundation, Madrid Salud Autonomous Organization, Madrid Complutense University, and Biomedical Technology Center), Portugal (University of Minho) and Denmark (University of Southern Denmark) along the three research projects that comprise it:
- "Factors associated with healthy and pathological aging in a sample of people over 90 years of age in the city of Madrid (MADRID + 90)", led by Dr. Miguel Ángel Fernández Blázquez, head of the Department of Neuropsychology of the CIEN Foundation.
- "Factors associated with healthy and pathological aging in a sample of people over 90 years of age in the Braga region (BRAGA + 90)", led by Dr. Nadine Correia Santos of the University of Minho.
- "Application of data mining techniques for the identification of factors of healthy and pathological aging (ImageH)", led by Dr. Jaime Gómez Ramírez of the Neuroimaging Department of the CIEN Foundation.
For this, PILEP + 90 will collect information, analyze and characterize the demographic, clinical, cognitive and cerebral profile of two samples of people over 90 years old from two different but complementary sociocultural realities: one urban, the city of Madrid, and another rural, the area of influence of Braga. In Madrid, a stratified random sampling based on municipal census data will be carried out, which will allow generalizing the results obtained to the rest of the population; For its part, Braga will have the help of health centers to contact potential study participants. In both cases, the study will be carried out in two consecutive stages: a first telephone survey and a subsequent face-to-face clinical evaluation.
In Madrid, the face-to-face evaluation will be carried out at the Alzheimer Center of the Reina Sofía Foundation, located in the PAU of Vallecas, where the CIEN Foundation has its facilities; This evaluation will include a clinical interview, a neurological examination, an exploration of the cognitive state, a cranial magnetic resonance study and an electroencephalographic record. In the case of Braga, the evaluations will be carried out in the homes of the study participants, so only clinical and cognitive information will be collected. In any case, the evaluation protocols and the databases will be similar in both research groups so that this will allow comparing the data collected. Additionally, PILEP + 90 will have the participation of a Danish research group that has a series of data from a sample from Copenhagen available.
In this way, a comparative study using a set of similar data from the three samples: Madrid, Braga and Copenhagen can be carried out in a cross-cultural manner. Finally, PILEP + 90 will also benefit from the information generated within the framework of the Vallecas Project, a longitudinal investigation for the early detection of Alzheimer's disease in which an annual follow-up is carried out on all participants. This project, which is still ongoing, was initiated by the CIEN Foundation in October 2011, with an initial cohort of 1,213 volunteers of both sexes aged between 70 and 85 years.
PILEP + 90 will allow obtaining reliable data on the prevalence of cognitively healthy persons with cognitive impairment, as well as validating a battery of clinical tests to study people of very advanced age. In addition, thanks to the combination and exploitation by means of automatic learning techniques of the demographic, lifestyle, clinical, cognitive and neuroimaging data collected in the study, it is expected that PILEP + 90 will help to delay the effects of cognitive ageing, decrease the risk of developing dementia, promote the level of functional independence and increase the quality of life of all elderly people.
