Can Thumbs UP: The Prevention arm of the Canadian Consortium on Neurodegeneration in Aging (CCNA)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: In 2019 Canadian dementia researchers launched the "The Canadian Therapeutic Platform Trial for Multidomain Interventions to Prevent Dementia" (CAN-THUMBS UP; CTU), a national program to advance dementia prevention in Canada and globally. The initiative responded to findings demonstrating that lifestyle interventions could improve cognitive decline and to the Lancet Commission's report that over 40% of dementia cases might be prevented through risk factor mitigation. METHOD: A major focus of CTU was developing and validating the Brain Health PRO Program, a 45-week, bilingual, web-based educational intervention addressing modifiable risk factors. The program consists of 181 ten-minute chapters delivered incrementally on a weekly basis. It was designed to foster engagement and convey the best available evidence for lifestyle changes. A total of 345 participants self-registered, completed initial questionnaires and gained access to the intervention. Dementia literacy, the primary outcome, was measured with the Alzheimer's Disease Knowledge Scale. Secondary outcomes included self-efficacy (General Self-Efficacy Scale), attitude toward dementia, user experience (System Usability Scale and Technology Acceptance Model Questionnaire), lifestyle, standard cognitive testing, smartphone-based cognitive assessment, 24-hour continuous mobility and sleep measures using actigraphy and sleep EEG wearables (Feldman, Belleville et al. 2023). RESULT: The validation study successfully achieved its primary outcome of improving dementia literacy. Positive effects were also observed for secondary outcomes, including self-efficacy and user satisfaction, with preliminary evidence suggesting a reduction in modifiable risk factors. Three additional studies leveraged the CTU infrastructure: SYNERGIC@Home, assessing the feasibility of a home-based intervention to improve gait and cognition; SYNERGIC-2, a randomized controlled trial testing a 12-month home-based personalized multidomain intervention in individuals at risk for dementia, using Brain Health PRO as a control condition; and an implementation sub-study conducted in collaboration with the Federation of Quebec Alzheimer Societies. CONCLUSION: CTU reflects a vibrant, collaborative effort of over 100 investigators, staff, citizen advisors, and partners. Leveraging CCNA's team structure, CTU incorporated contributions in study design, recruitment, technology, program evaluation and participatory research. Larger studies are underway within CCNA to confirm the efficacy of Brain Health PRO in mitigating dementia risk and to examine its implementation in diverse settings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".