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Running the World’s Largest Dementia Trial: Creyos and Maintain Your Brain

Getting thousands of people to participate in a cognitive study online is an ambitious feat. To achieve this, the Center for Healthy Brain Aging (CHeBA) needed a solution that could reach anyone in the world with an easy-to-complete and scientifically rigorous test.

That’s why they use Creyos.

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Study

Maintain Your Brain

Participants

1000+

Location

New South Wales, Australia

TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Challenge The Solution The Results

INTRODUCING MAINTAIN YOUR BRAIN:

Running the Largest Dementia Prevention Trial in the World

Around the world, a new case of dementia is diagnosed every 3 seconds. And the number of people with dementia is expected to double every 20 years. The Maintain Your Brain (MYB) trial, led by the Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing (CHeBA) in Australia, is aiming to fight this troubling trend by identifying the lifestyle activities that reduce future risk of dementia. To do so, they are recruiting thousands of participants to participate online, changing their lifestyles to slow the progression of dementia as they age.

The MYB trial is 3 years in length, delivering coaching online while regularly measuring brain health in order to help participants fight dementia and determine what strategies work. Coaching programs are tailored to target individual risk factors. Treatments include exercise, diet, cognitive training, and stress management—all factors with promise for maintaining brain health into old age, but never studied on such a massive scale. 

Creyos Research has been a great partner in our quest to revolutionize the way we fight dementia.
Professor Michael Valenzuela Chief Investigator Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing

THE CHALLENGE: 

Finding the Lifestyle Changes That Reduce Cognitive Deficits

Such an ambitious study is no small undertaking, so the investigators behind MYB needed a tool that can reach anybody in the world, takes a short amount of time, and keeps participants engaged. At the same time, it needs to have scientific rigor to accurately assess brain health.

The MYB trial involves thousands of participants from New South Wales, Australia. They knew that long, manually administered, pen-and-paper cognitive testing tools would not be feasible.

Also, scientific rigor can be hard to come by in online tools, but it’s indispensable when accurate conclusions about brain health are necessary. The tests need to be repeatable to assess progress and sensitive to changes in brain health in order to figure out what truly maintains cognition.

That’s where Creyos Research comes in. 

THE SOLUTION:

Rising to the Task of Testing Thousands

With Creyos Research contributing to an efficient trial, MYB can study thousands of participants. But Creyos Research scales to any size—from small pilot trials to collaborative international studies. Tests can be performed in a lab or at a participant’s home, with secure web-based testing that works on nearly any device.

The Creyos tests were also perfect for this long-term tracking of brain health. They can be taken in participants’ own homes, in a short amount of time, making it easy to gain an immense amount of data with almost no effort on the part of the investigators. 

Because the tests are proven reliable over time, and puzzles are randomly generated for each test to minimize practice effects, the investigators can be sure that changes in brain health are a direct result of their interventions.

Creyos Research provided outstanding technical expertise and support as an external partner in the massive IT development effort that was Maintain Your Brain.
Chris Boulamatsis System Architect Maintain Your Brain
Advance Care Planning

THE RESULT:

A Hopeful Outlook on the Future of Dementia Treatment

So far, positive results have come from the pilot testing for the world’s largest clinical trial that aims to reduce risk of dementia with a program 100% delivered over the Internet.

When the Maintain Your Brain trial is complete, the information and methods gained will provide real hope for an aging population to continue thriving in coming years.

Creyos Research Makes it Easy to Run Trials Large or Small

Running a study on cognition? Any researcher can use Creyos Research to reduce the time needed to set up and run a study, while maintaining the scientific integrity needed to publish rock-solid results. We’ll handle data collection and aggregation while you focus on the science.

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