Abstract

This special issue is ambitious in that it calls for strategic transformation in research on Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and related dementias, including innovation in both research design and value delivery, through lifestyle interventions that implicitly relate to a much broader range of comorbidities and diseases of aging. One response to this challenge is to venture beyond the boundaries of research that supports the healthcare industry. Toward this end, we introduce opportunities for research translation and knowledge transfer from NASA to the healthcare industry. Our intent is to show how NASA’s approach to research can guide innovation for a smart medical home, most notably for AD and other diseases of aging. The article is organized in four major sections: (a) aggregating fragmented research communities; (b) lifestyle interventions in the medical home; (c) multiscale computational modeling and analysis; and (d) lifespan approach to precision brain health. We provide novel motivations and transformative paths to a diversity of specific lines of research, across communities, that would be difficult to discover in common methods of networking within research communities and even through sophisticated bibliographic methods. We thus reveal how knowledge transfer between the public and private sector can stimulate development of broader scientific communities and achieve a more coherent strategic approach to integration and development of a diversity of capabilities including but not limited to technology.

Highlights

  • Mary is 91 years old and has lived alone at home for many years since her husband died

  • This special issue is ambitious in that it calls for strategic transformation in research on Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and, by implication, other diseases of aging

  • We described how NASA’s approach to research can guide innovation for a smart medical home, most notably for AD and other diseases of aging

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Summary

A Vignette about Aging in Place

Mary is 91 years old and has lived alone at home for many years since her husband died. The question for evidence-based medicine becomes whether science is up to the task of addressing the impact of medical conditions, such as those due to the diseases of aging, and experienced in the meaningful lives of individuals involved We believe that it is, partially based on the work of NASA in which the outcomes of medical conditions for the life and work of astronauts in space are continually monitored and considered in medical care and in the broader support of their health and well-being in extraordinary situations. NASA’s cross-cutting computational modeling project (CCMP) is engaged in a broader scientific community of multiscale modeling and analysis [70,71] while it is intimately intertwined with NASA’s modelbased systems engineering teams for development of exploration medical capabilities [18] This multi-faceted multi-layered approach to collaboration recognizes models as falsifiable scientific theories that can develop reciprocally with the accumulation of evidence from interactions with a diversity of stakeholders (see sections below on use, utility and value of research and technology development). There is an opportunity for NASA and the healthcare industry to make scientific progress faster together than they can alone

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CONFLICTS OF INTEREST

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