Nasser Bagheri

Delivery of more effective preventive intervention efforts to reduce and delay onset of dementia and cardiovascular disease (CVD) events requires knowing where high levels of convergence of dementia and CVD risks occur in communities. 

We calculated dementia risk scores for people aged 65 and over and identify people who have higher risk of developing dementia using GP clinical data from Adelaide. The estimated future risk of dementia will help to identify high risk individual and screening for early diagnosis of dementia in primary care setting. Further, this provides an opportunity to general practitioners to monitor risk factors for their patients and reduce or delay the risk of developing dementia.

We visualised the pattern of dementia risk score across communities to identify areas with greater risk of dementia. This allowed us to investigate the potential association between built environment factors and the pattern of community level dementia risk. We investigated air pollutions, public open green space, walkability and social fragmentation effects on dementia. Our result showed that there is an association between air pollution (level of NO2), social fragmentation and walkability index.

We found a significant relationship between social fragmentation (mobility component) and estimated dementia risk. This suggest that social inclusion and social cohesion measured as ‘neighbourhood’s social environment structure’ may be associated with reduced risk of dementia.

We found that an increased proportion of public open spaces within a SA1 was associated with a decrease in estimated risk of dementia. It is plausible that exposure to public open spaces may increase physical activity, leading to a protective effect for dementia risk

Bagheri N, Mavoa S, Tabatabaei-Jafari H, Knibbs LD, Coffee NT, Salvador-Carulla L, Anstey KJ. The Impact of Built and Social Environmental Characteristics on Diagnosed and Estimated Future Risk of Dementia. J Alzheimers Dis. 2021;84(2):621-632. doi: 10.3233/JAD-210208. PMID: 34569946.

Aw JYH, Smurthwaite K, Bagheri N. Investigating spatial convergence of diagnosed dementia, depression and type 2 diabetes prevalence in West Adelaide, Australia. J Affect Disord. 2020 Dec 1;277:524-530. doi: 10.1016/j.jad.2020.08.032. Epub 2020 Aug 22. PMID: 32882510.

At the time of award, Dr Bagheri was a Senior Research Fellow at the Australian National University (ANU), and led a Visual and Decision Analytics lab and spatial epidemiology team in the Centre for Mental Health Research at ANU.