Over 10 million elderly Indians have dementia: AI study

According to a first-of-its-kind study, published in the journal Neuroepidemiology, over 10 million older adults aged 60 or more in India may have dementia, comparable to the prevalence rates for the US, the UK and other countries.

The researchused an artificial intelligence (AI) technique known as semi-supervised machine learning to analyse data from 31,477 older adults. Theteam of researchers found that the prevalence rate of dementia in people aged 60 or more in India could be a striking 8.44 per cent, which equals10.08 million older adults in the country.

This compares to prevalence rates recorded in similar age groups of 8.8 per cent in the US, 9 per cent in the UK and between 8.5 and 9 per cent in Germany and France, the researchers added.

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The prevalence of dementia was greater in older people, women, who received no education, and lived in rural areas, according to theresearchers.

“Our research was based on the first and only nationally representative ageing study in India with more than 30,000 participating older adults in the country,” said Haomiao Jin, co-author of the study and Lecturer in Health Data Sciences at the University of Surrey, UK.

“AI has a unique strength in interpreting large and complex data like this, and our research found that the prevalence of dementia may be higher than prior estimates from local samples,” Jin said in a statement.

The AI learning model was developed by research teams from the University of Surrey, the University of Southern California, the University of Michigan, and the All India Institute of Medical Sciences.

The model was trained on data, which consisted of about 70 per cent labelled dataset with dementia diagnoses from a novel online consensus.

The remaining 30 per cent of the data was reserved to assess the AI’s predictive accuracy.

Surprisingly, the AI taught itself to predict dementia status for unlabelled observations without dementia diagnoses in the dataset.

“As we are seeing with this research, AI has a huge potential to discover patterns in complex data, improving our understanding of how diseases impact people across very different communities to support the development of precision medical interventions to save lives,” Professor Adrian Hilton, Director of the University of Surrey’s Institute for People-Centered AI, added.

(With inputs from agencies)