The Harmonized Diagnostic Assessment of Dementia for the Longitudinal Aging Study in India (LASI-DAD) is the first and only nationally representative and publicly available dataset on late-life cognition and dementia in India. It administers the Harmonized Cognitive Assessment Protocol (HCAP) that is designed to be harmonized with ongoing longitudinal studies of aging around the world, including the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) in the United States, and prior studies in India. This rich set of cognitive phenotypes and a variety of other health and social environment phenotypes, as well as genotype data from whole genome sequencing, give us a unique opportunity to identify the mutational spectrum underlying risk of dementia and AD in a representative sample of India. In this application, we aim to monitor and investigate the impacts of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) on the LASI-DAD households through phone surveys. The COVID-19 pandemic will fundamentally alter the lives of individuals across the world, and India is not an exception. To gain insight into the health and economic impacts of the pandemic, we propose to track the LASI-DAD households and conduct quarterly phone interviews for 1-year. Through continuous monitoring, we will assess how individuals? knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors related to the disease change over time, as well as the health and economic impacts of the pandemic. The collected data will be linked to the follow-up Wave 2 LASI-DAD for the estimation of their impacts on cognitive changes and dementia incidence.
This work will provide nationally representative data for estimating the impact of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in India. We will track and investigate how COVID-19-related changes in the social, economic, institutional, and policy environments impact the health and welfare of people across the life course and in vulnerable populations, such as older persons with cognitive impairment and dementia.
