Social Cognition, Nutrition and Cognitive Function in Middle Life: a Longitudinal Study

Background: Around the world, there is a new dementia case every 3 seconds, while Asia has the largest estimated number of persons with cognitive impairment (PWCIs) in 2015. The increasing cost of dementia care makes dementia care as a public health priority. In 2017, the Taiwanese government launched the Long-Term Care Policy 2.0, focusing on community services to prevent persons with cognitive impairment (PWCIs) from cognitive and functional decline. This new policy also includes family cargegivers to provide them high quality programs. Under this policy, there is increasing awareness in mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and subjective cognitive decline (SCD); those are the transitional states toward dementia. These transitional states become the windows of interventions. Therefore, we will recruit three types of cases: cognitive intact persons, persons with SCD/MCI and persons with early dementia to reflect the reality of the current community services users’ profiles. We also will recruit their family caregivers to investigate their distress. Clinical evidence showed that older adults, especially PWCIs had limited access to outdoor activities and to enjoy the sun shine. Therefore, they may suffer from loneliness and vitamin D insufficiency or deficit. These social cognition factors (outdoor activity, sun exposure, loneliness) and nutritional factors (serum vitamin D) not only impact older adults’ cognitive performance but also family caregiver distress. However, previous research often used questionnaires to measure the sun exposure behaviors. There is a lack of objective measures of ambient light. In addition, not many longitudinal studies existing to examine the mechanisms between social cognition, nutritional factors and cognitive impairment in PWCIs. Also FCG distress is not often neglected in such research. There are two possible mechanisms to explain the relationships between social cognition, nutrition and cognition impairment; one is white matter hypterintensive and the other is chronic inflammation.Purpose: Therefore, the purposes of this study are 4-fold: 1. to develop an innovative wearable devise to measure the illumination of the ambient light, including the sun light and examine its concurrent validity with UVB indexes provided by Taiwan Meteorological Bureau; 2. to compare the loneliness levels and serum 25(OH)D levels across cognitively intact group, SCD/MCI group and early dementia group; 3. To explore the impacts of social cognition and nutrition on PWCIs’ cognitive impairment as well as FCG distress by adding the mediators of while matter hyperintensity and chronic inflammation; 4. To examine the trajectories of social cognition, nutritional factor and cognitive impairment of PWCIs and FCG distress over 3 years. Methods: This is a 3-year longitudinal study to examine the cross-sectional relationships and trajectories of social cognition, nutritional factors and cognitive impairment of PWCIs and FCG distress. Data collected by our project can be the foundation to develop future interventions. Keyword:　wearable devise, social cognition, nutrition, cognitive impairment, MRI

Project ID:PC10709-0052
External Project ID:MOST107-2314-B182-076