Optimizing the Aging Brain: The BEAD Study on the Ethics of Dementia Prevention.

Abstract

Dementia has lately undergone a profound reconceptualization. Long conceived of as an unpreventable process of mental deterioration, current evidence shows that it can be prevented in at least one in three cases intervening on a specified set of factors. Issues of justice and equity loom large on the implementation of dementia prevention, from a global health perspective. Our project thus embraces emerging evidence about dementia risk factors and their uneven distribution nationally and globally by specifically focusing on the situated aspects of dementia prevention. The aim of the BEAD study (Optimizing the Aging Brain? Situating Ethical Aspects in Dementia Prevention) is to dissect the ethical and clinical assumptions of this novel understanding of dementia, and to analyze how such new discourse on dementia prevention plays out in three countries: Canada, Germany and Switzerland. This study adopts a multi-perspective, comparative, qualitative approach, combining stakeholder interviews with different kinds of focused ethnographies, elaborating on conceptual, ethical, and social aspects of what we would like to call the "new dementia". By situating the paradigmatic shifts in Alzheimer's and dementia research within current aging cultures and contemporary social policies, we aim to initiate a debate about the often implicit unresolved social, ethical, and political implications and preconditions of the medical understanding and handling of cognitive disorders.