Now more than ever, the research community should be concentrating on finding ways to reduce the incidence of dementia. The population is aging, and the number of individuals affected by dementia remains a major public health challenge. The reality is that we have no effective treatments for dementia. In the absence of treatments to cure the disorder (or even reduce the associated burden by delaying onset or reducing disability), the prevention of dementia must be a priority research topic. Modifiable risk factors are associated with dementia¹ (eg, diabetes and attendant behavioral risks, such as diet and physical activity); these risk factors are important but complex targets for intervention. However, as with many neurologic and psychiatric disorders, we have a scant appreciation of the environmental risk factors that contribute to dementia risk. There is an urgent need to generate new candidate risk factors for dementia. In contrast to genetics, for which there are now cost-efficient, high-throughput screening methods that can generate genetic candidates, epidemiology relies on a mix of creative researchers and access to suitable databases that contain the variables of interest. Epidemiologists are envious of our colleagues in genetics, in which the search space for risk variants is more tractable and bounded.

现在，研究界比以往任何时候都应该更加专注于寻找减少痴呆症发生率的方法。人口老龄化，受痴呆症影响的人数仍然是主要的公共卫生挑战。现实情况是，我们没有有效的痴呆治疗方法。在缺乏治疗该疾病的方法（或什至通过延缓发病或减轻残疾来减轻相关负担）的情况下，预防痴呆症必须成为优先研究的课题。可改变的危险因素与痴呆^1相关（例如，糖尿病和随之而来的行为风险，例如饮食和体育锻炼）；这些风险因素很重要，但干预目标很复杂。但是，与许多神经系统疾病和精神疾病一样，我们对导致痴呆症风险的环境风险因素知之甚少。迫切需要产生痴呆症的新的候选危险因素。与遗传学相反，对于遗传学而言，现在存在可以生成遗传候选物的具有成本效益的高通量筛选方法，而流行病学则依赖于富有创造力的研究人员以及对包含感兴趣变量的合适数据库的访问。流行病学家羡慕我们的遗传学同事，在这些同事中，寻找风险变体的空间更容易控制和限制。