P3–196: Overview of the Korean Longitudinal Study on Cognitive Aging and Dementia

As South Korea is at the forefront of a worldwide eruption of dementia, South Korea has been an effort to grapple with dementia. The Korean Longitudinal Study on Cognitive Aging and Dementia (KLoSCAD) was developed to gain further understanding of how social, biomedical, and environmental factors are associated with dementia in Korea and to compare it with other races and other countries. The main objectives of the KLoSCAD were 1) to estimate epidemiology of dementia and related disorders 2) to investigate the diagnostic markers for dementia and normative data of cognitive function 3) to develop management and the preventive strategies for dementia 4) to investigate the economics and policies for dementia in Korea. The KLOSCAD was designed as a population-based prospective cohort study of Korean elders. Subjects were drawn from randomly selected 13,749 individuals aged 60 years and over live in the fourteen communities, 997 tracked among 1,673 participants in the Nationwide Dementia Epidemiology Study of Korea (NDESK) was conducted from May 2008 through October 2008 and 1,000 participants in the Korean Longitudinal Study on Health and Aging (KLoSHA) was conducted from September 2005 through September 2006 in Seongnam. The baseline study of the KLOSCAD was conducted from November 2010 through September 2012. The follow-up studies will be performed at 2-year intervals until 2018. The participant rates for the baseline date collection were 51% (n=7537) among randomly sampled individuals, 50% (n=500) among participants in NDESK, and 50% (n=498) among participants in KLoSHA. In total, 8,539 (3669 men and 4870 women) subjects constituted the KLOSCAD cohort at baseline. Their mean age was 71.3 ±7.8 years (range, 56–101 years). Dementia and mild cognitive impairment were 4.5% and 19.3% among the random sample subjects, 7.4% and 32.0% among the NDESK subjects and 7.0% and 20.1% among the KLoSHA subjects. The KLoSCAD may not only provide comprehensive epidemiological data on the dementia of Korean elders, but also may stimulate comprehensive multifactorial researches on cognitive aging and contribute to policy formulation and planning of programs for management and prevention of dementia and social services in Korea.