Leveraging medical records to identify patients at risk of neurodegenerative disease

Neurodegenerative diseases represent a main public health issue in our society and a great challenge in drug development. Prevention policies have therefore become essential.

Key to the implementation of prevention measures is the identification of at-risk individuals.LeMeReND proposes to use electronic health records to identify biomedical risk factors through studying previous diagnoses, drug prescription, clinical care use, and biological test results.

We will use longitudinal data including millions of patients who had been followed for 10+ years before diagnosis in 4 different health care systems: Australia, France, the UK and Sweden and across 4 therapeutic areas: Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, dementia with Lewy bodies and motor neuron diseases.

We will identify biomedical factors that are common to these diseases and the ones differentiating them.

We will use these factors to stratify patients based on their progression profile, for the design of tailored primary prevention measures.

We will then develop a screening tool which will give each patient a propensity score to develop different neurodegenerative diseases.

Such a tool could be easily deployed at the point of care to enrich populations in at-risk individuals for secondary prevention trials. We will also evaluate the economic and social consequences of these new precision prevention measures. Finally, we will explore genetic and imaging biomarkers to understand the underlying pathological processes.