The University of Cambridge, Fortis Hospitals and UK-based brain health company Prema Cognition have announced an international research collaboration to improve understanding of the earliest stages of cognitive impairment and dementia. Patient recruitment is expected to begin next month.
The prospective longitudinal study will enrol more than 300 patients presenting with cognitive symptoms at Fortis Hospitals in India. Participants will undergo brain MRI, extensive cognitive assessments, clinical evaluation and blood biomarker testing.
The study will include participants across the early cognitive health spectrum, including healthy controls, people with subjective cognitive decline (SCD) and patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI).
The collaboration is being led and coordinated by Prema Cognition, in partnership with researchers at the University of Cambridge Memory Lab and clinicians at Fortis Hospitals.
Dr Julia Cooney, founder and CEO of Prema Cognition, said, “The future of dementia research lies in understanding the disease earlier and building more diverse datasets that better reflect the global population. This collaboration represents an important step towards that future.”
The initiative comes as disease-modifying treatments begin to transform dementia care, increasing the importance of identifying patients at the earliest possible stage. Although advances in blood tests, neuroimaging and digital testing have advanced rapidly, relatively few prospective clinical studies have combined these approaches in the same participants and followed them over time.
The research collaboration aims to address this gap by generating a high-quality longitudinal dataset that will allow researchers to investigate how clinical symptoms, cognitive performance, imaging findings, and biological markers interact during the earliest phases of disease.
The study will also expand the geographic and demographic representation of dementia research. Large-scale dementia studies have historically been concentrated in Europe and North America, while populations in India and other regions remain comparatively underrepresented. Conducting the study in India could provide valuable data from a population with a large ageing demographic and a growing burden of dementia.
By combining advanced digital cognitive assessment with clinical investigations conducted as part of routine care, the study aims to generate evidence that can support both specialist academic centres and healthcare systems seeking scalable and equitable approaches to earlier diagnosis.
Ultimately, the researchers hope the findings will contribute to earlier identification of dementia, timely access to support and a shift towards earlier intervention and prevention rather than treatment of established disease.
