Cambridge, Fortis and Prema launch dementia early-detection study

The University of Cambridge, Fortis Hospitals and Prema Cognition are launching a prospective study in India to track more than 300 patients with early cognitive symptoms. The project aims to build one of the richest multimodal datasets on dementia’s earliest stages, as researchers race to improve earlier diagnosis and intervention.

Why it matters: - The study could help doctors detect dementia earlier, when support and future disease-modifying treatments may have the most impact. - The collaboration is designed to fill a major research gap by combining imaging, cognitive testing, clinical exams and blood biomarkers in the same patients over time. - The work will also add data from India, where dementia research has been less represented than in Europe and North America.

What happened: - The University of Cambridge, Fortis Hospitals and Prema Cognition announced a major international research collaboration focused on the earliest stages of cognitive impairment and dementia. - Patient recruitment will start next month. - The prospective longitudinal study will enroll more than 300 patients presenting with cognitive symptoms at Fortis Hospitals in India. - Participants will include healthy controls, people with subjective cognitive decline and patients with mild cognitive impairment.

The details: - Each participant will receive a brain MRI, extensive cognitive assessment, clinical evaluation and blood biomarker testing. - The study will also include full neurological assessment, digital cognitive testing using PREMAZ, neuropsychological testing and extensive blood investigations. - Researchers expect the project to become one of the world’s richest multimodal datasets focused on the earliest stages of dementia. - The collaboration is built to study the continuum from normal cognition to the first clinically detectable changes. - The dataset is intended to show how symptoms, cognitive performance, imaging findings and biological markers interact during early disease. - More than 300 brain MRIs will give researchers a large deeply characterized prospective clinical dataset to study structural brain changes alongside cognition and biomarkers.

Between the lines: - Dementia research has often focused on patients after major memory loss has already set in, which limits insight into the disease’s earliest phase. - The project reflects a shift toward earlier intervention and prevention rather than treatment after disease is established. - Prema Cognition has spent three years working with the Cambridge Memory Lab to turn more than a decade of Cambridge research into a digital memory test for routine care. - PREMAZ launched 12 months ago and is now in more than 30 clinics across the UK and US. - Prema Cognition has also built six clinical research collaborations involving more than 1,200 participants, making this its largest study so far. - Founder and CEO Julia Cooney said the future of dementia research lies in earlier detection and more diverse datasets that better reflect the global population. - Locating the study in India may help address a population that is both rapidly aging and underrepresented in international dementia research.

What's next: - Researchers will begin recruiting patients next month. - The team will use the longitudinal dataset to study how early clinical symptoms connect with brain imaging and biological markers over time. - The collaboration aims to inform scalable and equitable approaches to earlier diagnosis in routine healthcare settings.

The bottom line: - Cambridge, Fortis Hospitals and Prema Cognition are betting that combining routine care with advanced digital and biomarker testing can move dementia detection much earlier, and in a more globally representative patient pool.

More information: PREMAZ Company page: Prema Cognition on LinkedIn