The Impact of the COVID-19 Epidemic on the Health of Older Adults

To prevent the spread of COVID-19 societies around the world have implemented various levels of lockdown strategies. Norway locked down major parts of the society from March 2020. Specifically, this meant that public services were closed (e.g. most in-home healthcare services, day care centres, group exercise/gyms and services that offer physiotherapy, medical and psychological consultation). For people with cognitive impairment and dementia, social distancing and self-isolation may have limited the use of normal strategies (e.g., distraction, stimulation, and social interaction) that are routinely adopted to manage some of the dementia symptoms, such as neuropsychiatric symptoms. A lack of daily routines may change the clinical conditions of patients with dementia. Worsening of preexisting and/or the onset of new neuropsychiatric symptoms may occur, in addition to a possible decline of cognitive and functional capacities

Aim: The overarching aim of this project is to provide decision makers with vital information to improve the healthcare of people with dementia and cognitive impairment in the context of an epidemic.

Method: We will use four data sources:1) The fourth wave of the Trøndelag Health study (HUNT, HUNT4 70+), 2) Three national health registries (The Norwegian Patient Registry (NPR), the Norwegian Registry for Primary Health Care (NRPHC) and the Norwegian Prescription Database (NorPD)), 3) A postal questionnaire concerning social isolation during the COVID-19 epidemic, and 4) The Ageing in Trøndelag study (AiT), which is a follow-up of the HUNT4 70+ study.

With this linkage of cohort data and national health registry data, we can identify factors that may make people with cognitive impairment and dementia vulnerable to loss of healthcare services because of COVID-19 and subsequently to negative health consequences.