Preventing Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and related dementias is a global priority—yet no new drugs have been approved since 2002, and most of the drugs available today do not do much to change the progression of the disease. However, multi-modal preventive treatments that simultaneously target several disease mechanisms and risk factors show great promise. In particular, the lifestyle-based, multi-dimensional Finnish Geriatric Intervention Study to Prevent Cognitive Impairment and Disability (FINGER) addresses nutrition, physical exercise, cognitive training, and vascular/metabolic risk management, and it has shown significant cognitive benefits in at-risk older adults in a large-scale, long-term randomized control trial.

World-Wide FINGERS (WW-FINGERS) aims to adapt and expand the FINGER model to countries around the world, building the first global network of multimodal dementia-prevention trials. This network will give researchers around the world the opportunity to harmonize, adapt, and share data and analyses across trials and sites.

WW-FINGERS’ approach to dementia-prevention trials can lay the groundwork for the development of better treatments for AD.

WW-FINGERS will assess the efficacy of multi-modal interventions to slow or prevent cognitive decline and dementia. It will also help close the significant research gaps in the field by establishing a rich global data repository along with protocols and infrastructure for data alignment, harmonization, and sharing.

ADDI is supporting WW-FINGERS’ efforts to help researchers harmonize and share the data their individual studies generate, facilitating an interoperable data architecture that enables joint analyses and comparisons across studies and sites.