An ad hoc committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (National Academies) will examine the current state of the evidence on interventions for preventing, slowing, or delaying the onset of amnestic mild cognitive impairment; preventing, slowing, or delaying the onset of clinical Alzheimer’s and related dementias; and delaying or slowing age-related cognitive decline. The study will revisit the National Academies’ report Preventing Cognitive Decline and Dementia: A Way Forward (2017), incorporating the significantly expanded evidence base generated since then. Based on its assessment of the evidence, the committee will make recommendations for future research and public health actions.

The National Academies will commission an Evidence-based Practice Center (EPC) to update and expand (to include dementias other than Alzheimer’s disease) a prior systematic review that served as the primary basis for the 2017 National Academies report. The EPC’s independent systematic review will consider evidence published since then, incorporate evidence on both non-pharmacological and pharmacological interventions, and determine whether the strength of evidence has advanced.

The National Academies’ committee will work over two phases:

Phase 1: The committee will convene to inform the development of the EPC systematic review. The committee will provide a short publicly-released report that describes potential changes and considerations for the key questions and study design that would result in a systematic review that would be most informative for the committee’s work during phase 2.

Phase 2: The committee will reconvene to consider the state of the evidence. The committee will hold an information-gathering workshop open to the public to seek input from stakeholders on the draft EPC systematic evidence review. Based on the EPC systematic review and additional expert and public input, the committee will assess the quality of existing evidence and develop a second report that makes recommendations for future research and possible public health actions.

The report will focus on interventions that prevent, slow, or delay the onset of cognitive impairment or dementia; it will not focus on identifying risks for developing dementia, amnestic mild cognitive impairment, and age-related cognitive impairment, as this has been the topic of significant previous research.

The committee’s study will include dementia caused by Alzheimer’s disease as well as related conditions including frontotemporal disorders, Lewy body dementia, Limbic-predominant age-related TDP-43 encephalopathy (LATE), vascular contributions to cognitive impairment and dementia, and multiple etiology dementias.