Early detection of AD allows patients to have an active role in managing their condition, and to plan how to minimize the strain on their dear ones. Despite known benefits, a large proportion of dementia cases remain undiagnosed or receive a late stage diagnosis. The MOPEAD project addressed this issue by exploring innovative strategies to emerge “hidden” cases of cognitive impairment.
MOPEAD had a focussed set of objectives aimed at:
1. Establishing multiple key regional project sites across Europe to identify and test models of efficient earlier identification of mild AD dementia and prodromal AD patients, and awareness of AD, memory complaints, and cognitive decline risk.
2. Assessing key tools, mechanisms and processes for community engagement and patient identification and resource utilisation in various communities.
3. Comparing and contrasting various patient access models and their contribution to improved detection, diagnosis and clinical research.
4. Based on findings, establishing archetypes of patient access models for implementation in similar communities.
5. Advocating and distributing access models for broader application and for replication.
The principles used to achieve this included:
• Establishing regional hubs across five EU countries (ES, DE, NL, SE, and SL).
• Implementing, testing and evaluating 4 models for Patient Engagement (PE) involving 2000 patients to explore two categories (Mild AD and prodromal AD).
• The MOPEAD PE models are: 1) AD Citizen Science (online), 2) Open House Initiatives, 3) Primary care, 4) type 2 diabetes patients in tertiary care.
• Capitalise and leverage resources brought to MOPEAD by specialist partners to ensure effective engagement with the relevant stakeholders.
• Help bridge the gap between clinicians, practitioners, and health decision makers to harmonise discussions on how to tackle AD.
MOPEAD showed that innovative strategies can be useful for patient engagement, identifying more than 1100 individuals with MCI and mild AD that otherwise would remain undiagnosed. The results of MOPEAD suggest that these different strategies instead of being mutually exclusive could be complementary since they are targeting different populations. Thus, population based strategies such as Citizen Science and Open House showed great potential to engage a high number of younger individuals whereas patient based strategies engaged fewer participants but older and at higher risk of having cognitive impairment.
Through its dissemination and clinical activities MOPEAD contributed to raise the awareness among the general population, healthcare providers and policy makers of the benefits of patient engagement in early detection of AD