Statistical approaches to understanding links between lifestyle and brain health

What is it about?

This article provides an overview of statistical approaches used to explore multiple lifestyle risk factors and associations with brain health outcomes in adults. The key take home message is that we need to explore alternative statistical approaches to better understand whether specific combinations, or clusters, of lifestyle-related risk factors are more beneficial than others when it comes to brain health outcomes such as dementia.

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Why is it important?

Promoting good brain health and reducing risk of dementia is of utmost importance, and growing research indicates that optimising various lifestyle-related risk factors has great potential for achieving this goal. However, understanding how we can explore links between multiple lifestyle-related risk factors and brain health outcomes presents a number of challenges to researchers. Hence, the overview of statistical approaches employed to date and recommendations for key considerations provided by this article provide several key insights.