Closing the gap in dementia research by community-based cohort studies in the Chinese population

Abstract

China accounts for 1/5 of the global population and China faces a particularly heavy dementia burden due to its rapidly ageing population. Unique historical events, genetic background, sociocultural factors, lifestyle, and the COVID-19 pandemic further influence cognitive outcomes in the Chinese population. We searched PubMed, Web of Science, and Embase for community-based cohort studies related to dementia in the Chinese population, and summarized the characteristics, methodologies, and major findings published over the last 25 years from 39 cohorts. We identified critical research gaps and propose future directions, including enhancing sample representativeness, investigating China-specific risk factors, expanding exposure measurements to the whole life-span, collecting objective data, conducting administer-friendly domain-specific cognitive assessments, adopting pathological diagnostic criteria, standardizing biobank construction, verifying multi-modal biomarkers, examining social and genetic-environmental aspects, and monitoring post-COVID cognitive health, to approach high quality of dementia studies that can provide solid evidence to policy making and promote global brain health research.