Multi-million European research consortium on age-related disorders

According to the University of Manchester (UMAN), 7 in 10 Europeans over the age of 65 have either sight or hearing loss, and over two thirds suffer from depression or dementia. The cumulative impact of these dual or triple impairments is known to be far greater than the individual conditions but the related sensory and cognitive problems are currently poorly understood. And the issue is of growing importance with an aging population.

To investigate this more closely and develop new tools to improve quality of life and optimize health and social care, the new research consortium has launched the 5-year SENSE-Cog project, funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 research program. Dr Iracema Leroi, an academic psychiatrist from UMAN and lead researcher for the project, explains the problem in more detail: “In combination, these problems have a much greater effect than each one individually. Imagine if you have dementia which affects your memory or interferes with your recognition of familiar people. When you add visual impairment to that, you can understand why those affected may experience even greater cognitive difficulty or even experience altered behavior such as agitation or hallucinations.”

Some of the focus areas of the project are to define the scale of the related challenges so that resources can be allocated optimally, to develop online tests and guides on the topic, and to produce multilingual training manuals to help medical professionals diagnose and treat these combined deficits more effectively.

Source: University of Manchester