Dementia Prevention Internet-Based Intervention: Randomized Controlled Trial and Knowledge Translation

Background:

With our aging population, the prevalence of dementia is increasing dramatically. Developing a better understanding of how dementia can be prevented and sharing information about how Canadians can reduce their risk of developing dementia or delay its onset is critical to keeping Canadians healthy and improving quality of life. Web-based interventions in dementia have been shown to be effective for a range of outcomes, but very few have been widely implemented or rigorously studied; additionally, national, and provincial guidelines have all highlighted the importance of online resources to improve dementia prevention education. This has been further brought into focus by the coronavirus pandemic. While there have been studies of web-based health information on intentions and behaviour change, the vast majority of those studies have looked at text-based health information, rather than internet-based interventions that have incorporated best practices in instructional design for e-learning. This project will help to address this gap in the literature, as improved instructional design should have an impact on knowledge gain, which the investigators hypothesize may increase intentions and behaviour change.

The investigators developed a high-quality, award-winning web- and email-based dementia prevention education platform for care partners, which includes asynchronous, multimedia e-learning lessons and email-based 'micro-learning' content to reinforce the learning.

Objective:

In this proposal, the investigators plan to study the effectiveness of our web-based intervention on dementia prevention knowledge, intentions, and behaviour change.