The VA Million Veteran Program, Alzheimer's disease, and genetics: Important steps forward but many steps still to go on the march to control dementia and Alzheimer's disease.

Abstract

The VA Million Veteran Program (MVP) is a nationwide initiative that seeks to examine how genes influence health and behaviors in military veterans. An article by Merritt et al. analyzing data from the MVP, developing and testing algorithms to query dementia and Alzheimer's disease (AD) diagnoses from the VA's electronic health record system and examining genetic factors, provides an extraordinarily important contribution to the dementia and AD fields. The analyses presented in the article show how large databases can be used to further understand dementia and AD, pointing the way for many more important advances for this field.