Using electronic health records to understand the effects of dietary supplements among patients with Mild cognitive impairment
Student
Jiyang Chen
Advisor
Rui Zhang
Abstract
Alzheimer’s disease is currently ranked as the sixth leading cause of death in the United States. Preventing Alzheimer’s disease(AD) and related dementias(ADRD) remains very challenging. The most important approach to tackle the dementia epidemic is to prevent AD and ADRD in its prodromal stage of Mild Cognitive Impairment(MCI). In recent years, there has been evidence indicating the role of dietary supplements in preventing cognitive impairments. This project aimed to use electronic health records to explore the effects of dietary supplement usage on conversion to ADRD among those with MCI. We applied age- and sex-adjusted Cox proportional hazards models to explore the association between usage of dietary supplements (extracted from electronic health records using Natural Language Processing) and time to conversion from MCI to ADRD (defined by ICD-9 codes). We also investigated the effects of dietary supplements on MCI-ADRD conversion across different age groups.