Doha, 21 February 2024: Dr. Hanadi Al-Hamad, Deputy Chief for Long-Term Care, Rehabilitation and Geriatrics, and lead for HMC Therapists and Social Care Services, instigated a study on awareness of dementia risk reduction among HMC healthcare professionals in the second half of 2023. The study, which was published in a Lancet Journal paper, suggests that many healthcare professionals (76% of participants) believe that dementia is preventable and more than 75% of them chose dementia risk reduction as the top priority for the Qatar National Dementia Research Plan.
The comprehensive, cross-sectional survey among healthcare professionals across multiple hospitals and practice settings covered several topics, including beliefs about the preventability of dementia, interest in receiving information on lifestyle factors that impact brain health, demographics, awareness of memory clinics, years of professional experience, practice settings, perceived barriers, awareness of risk factors, and sources of information.
“Dementia poses a significant global health challenge, and this is one of a series of research studies that my team conducted to investigate the need for raising public awareness about dementia risk reduction practices, preventive measures and access to professional services in Qatar,” said Dr. Al-Hamad, who is also the Head of the WHO Collaborating Center for Healthy Ageing and Dementia. “Participants demonstrated an intermediate level of knowledge about various risk factors for dementia, such as hypertension, depression, alcohol consumption, education level, smoking, head injury, and physical inactivity. While we conduct annual internal and external campaigns for Alzheimer's awareness, this research has demonstrated that further targeted knowledge is needed for staff.”
Most respondents had over ten years of professional experience and occupied diverse roles in allied health, nursing, and physician specialties across acute care, outpatient, and long-term care settings.
Dr. Brijesh Sathian, Post Doctoral Research Scientist at HMC’s Department of Geriatrics and Long-Term Care noted that the survey suggests that many healthcare professionals (76% of participants) believe that dementia is preventable and 87.4% showed a strong inclination towards obtaining information about lifestyle factors that impact brain health and the risk of dementia. more than 75% of them chose dementia risk reduction as the top priority for the Qatar National Dementia Research Plan.
Dr. Al-Hamad added: “It is essential to understand healthcare professionals' perceptions, awareness levels, and barriers related to dementia prevention to tailor educational interventions and resource allocation to enhance knowledge dissemination and empower preventive measures among both professionals and the general population. Given the absence of effective disease-modifying treatments for dementia, efforts to reduce the projected increase in dementia cases must focus on disease prevention through interventions targeting modifiable risk factors.”
Regular education program aim to develop clinical and non-clinical knowledge of diagnosis and treatment practices, as well as inform staff about specific sources of information, like Alzheimer's associations and memory clinic training programs at HMC, including the Healthy Aging website.
This information is valuable for public health planning, particularly in terms of increasing the availability of resources required to support individuals with dementia and their caregivers. Additionally, the anticipated increase in the number of people with dementia, largely due to population growth and increasing longevity, emphasizes the urgent need for research focused on discovering disease-modifying treatments, cost-effective interventions, and novel modifiable risk factors for the prevention or delay of disease onset.
