2021 Winter GAPNA Newsletter Volume 40 Number 4

Charting a Research Agenda in Social Science for Dementia and Alzheimer’s

By 2060, nearly 14 million people in the United States will be living with dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, placing substantial demands on the healthcare system and caregivers. The annual economic cost of dementia in the United States was estimated at $305 billion in 2020 and is expected to rise to $1.5 trillion by 2050.

Social and behavioral science research can point to possible pathways for slowing or preventing development of dementia or easing its social and economic impacts — pathways that biological and pharmaceutical research cannot provide.

For example, social science research can improve understanding of the socioeconomic factors that affect cognitive health, identify the most effective ways to communicate health information to those at risk, and suggest policy remedies for inequitable access to health care.

A New Report

Reducing the Impact of Dementia in America: A Decadal Survey of Behavioral and Social Science Research, a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine charts a path forward for the next 10 years of research on dementia in the behavioral and social sciences.

The report recommends research prioritize improving the lives of people affected by dementia and their caregivers, rectifying disparities, developing innovations that can improve quality of care and social supports, easing economic costs of dementia, and pursing advances in researchers’ ability to study dementia.

The report also notes research will be most effective if it is coordinated to avoid redundant studies, ensures findings can be implemented in clinical and community settings, and takes policy and socioeconomic implications into account throughout the course of a study.

Funders of dementia-related research should incentivize these approaches and others in their guidelines for awarding research grants.


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