From Knowing to Recognising: When Does Dementia Prevention Evidence Become Personally Relevant? Rethinking the Translation of Dementia Prevention Evidence in Midlife

Abstract

Peter Carey

The evidence supporting dementia risk reduction has grown rapidly. Current guidance takes a life-course view, bringing together healthy behaviours, management of vascular and metabolic conditions, environmental exposures and, increasingly, multidomain approaches. But having evidence is not the same as making that evidence meaningful to the people who receive it.

This conceptual paper examines a point in dementia prevention that is easy to overlook: what happens when population- level evidence reaches an individual and has to be interpreted in the context of everyday life. Awareness, knowledge, health literacy, risk perception, prevention literacy and behavioural intention each describe part of this process. None, however, quite captures the question at the heart of this paper: what does this evidence mean for me, now, and in the circumstances in which I live?

The paper proposes Personal Relevance of Dementia Prevention Evidence (PR-DPE) to describe the process through which a person interprets dementia prevention evidence in relation to their circumstances, life stage, experiences, priorities and perceived capacity to respond. Five interrelated dimensions are proposed: recognition, personal applicability, temporal relevance, personal meaning and perceived agency. These dimensions are situated within the social, environmental, health-system and digital contexts that shape how people understand information and make decisions.

The distinction between knowing and recognising may be especially important in midlife. Dementia may still seem far away, even though many of the factors associated with later risk are already part of everyday life. PR-DPE is not intended to replace risk prediction or dementia prevention literacy, and it is not presented as a validated construct. Instead, it offers a testable way of thinking about the space between encountering evidence and seeing what that evidence means personally, together with a research agenda for measurement, validation and intervention design.

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