Welcome to the Healthy Brain Project

The Healthy Brain Project has now closed.

For more information, please see our announcement by clicking on the News tab. Thank you for your support and engagement over the years.
If you are interested in learning about our new initative, the Healthy Brain Hub, please fill in this form and we will get in touch with you.
If you have any questions, please contact our research team at healthybrainproject@monash.edu.
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LATEST NEWS

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The Healthy Brain Project is Closing Down

After eight years, the time has arrived for the Healthy Brain Project to come to an end. It certainly is the end of an era. We would first like to thank all our participants for your hard work and dedication over the years. The Healthy Brain Project was the first study of our research program, led by Associate Professor Yen Ying Lim. Results from the Healthy Brain Project have helped us advance understanding of the many different factors that may influence aging, cognition and dementia risk in midlife and have enabled us to obtain additional funding to further our understanding of Alzheimer’s disease. Thank you for coming on this journey with us, for being so engaged and generous with your time and efforts, and for joining us in this fight against dementia.

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What Happens Next

From the 15th of November 2024, Healthy Brain Project accounts will be restricted. This means that you will no longer be able to complete any surveys or memory and thinking tests and you will no longer receive emails to complete your yearly assessments. You will, however, still be able to log into your account for a limited amount of time. Once we have wrapped up the Healthy Brain Project, our team will prepare a final feedback report for each of you based on your most recent assessment. As these reports are personalised, they take our team some time to prepare so you may expect to receive your report in February 2025. Once the reports are uploaded to your Healthy Brain Project accounts, we will send an email to let you know. You will then have three months to access and download your report from your account until your account is deactivated. If you are not able to download your report within that time or have any questions, please email us at healthybrainproject@monash.edu.

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Introducing the Healthy Brain Hub

We are very excited to introduce our new initiative, the Healthy Brain Hub, funded by the Medical Research Future Fund. We hope to take all the lessons we learned about conducting memory testing online from the Healthy Brain Project, and apply them to the real world. The Healthy Brain Hub aims to determine whether conducting brain health assessments online, either self-administered like in the Healthy Brain Project or via telehealth, can help identify people in the community who may be experiencing memory and thinking difficulties.

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Introducing the Healthy Brain Hub

If you sign up to the Healthy Brain Hub, you and your GP will receive a report with outcomes of your brain health assessment, including the results of any memory and thinking testing that we do. We are interested in whether the information obtained through these brain health assessments are useful and helpful to you and your doctor, in informing ongoing care. It is important to note, however, that we will not be providing you with a diagnosis of dementia, mild cognitive impairment, or any other cognitive or memory-related condition. Instead, we will be providing some information about your brain health that might help your doctor rule in or rule out some of these conditions. If you are interested in joining the Healthy Brain Hub, please fill in this form or email healthybrainhub@monash.edu.

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Thank you

Thank you again for your participation in the Healthy Brain Project. We hope you’ve enjoyed your time with us as much as we’ve enjoyed having you. We hope you will continue on with us at the Healthy Brain Hub, but if not, thank you for your trust in our team over these past few years. If you have any questions, please contact us at healthybrainproject@monash.edu.

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WHO WE ARE

The Healthy Brain Project is supported by generous grants from the National Health and Medical Research Council, the Australian Research Council, the Alzheimer’s Association International Research Grant Program, the Dementia Australia Research Foundation, and the Bethlehem Griffiths Research Foundation.

YEN YING LIM

YEN YING LIM

B.A., B.App.Sci (Hons), M.Psych, Ph.D.

Yen Ying is the primary investigator of the Healthy Brain Project and an Associate Professor at the Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health (School of Psychological Sciences, Monash University). Her research interests include understanding genetic and lifestyle factors that may accelerate or protect against brain diseases, and developing digital cognitive tools to better detect brain diseases. Her work is supported by the NHMRC, Dementia Australia, the Department of Health and Human Services (Victoria), and the Alzheimer’s Association (USA).

RACHEL BUCKLEY

RACHEL BUCKLEY

B.Sc (Hons), Ph.D.

Rachel is a lead investigator of the Healthy Brain Project and an Instructor at Harvard Medical School (USA) and the University of Melbourne (Australia). Her research interests focus on early detection of dementia, specifically in understanding sex differences in risk for Alzheimer’s disease biomarkers, and in the importance of subjective concerns of memory decline in the earliest stages of disease. Her work is supported by the National Institutes of Health (National Institute of Aging K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award), the Alzheimer’s Association, and the Women’s Brain Initiative at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Common Questions

Everything you need to know before you get started

WHAT IS THE AIM OF THIS PROJECT?

Basically, our aim is to track a large group of middle-aged Australians so that we can identify which parts of brain biology, genes, psychology and behaviour (or a combination of) can help predict who will progress to dementia later in life. To achieve this, we hope to gather a comprehensive amount of information from 10, 000 volunteers and follow them each year for at least five years (and longer in possible!).

WHAT IS EXPECTED OF ME IF I AGREE TO PARTICIPATE?

You will be asked to participate in a series of memory and thinking tests, and to fill out surveys related to lifestyle, mood, personality, medical history and demographic information. You can do this over a period of days, whenever you can snatch some spare time! Obviously, we’d like you to do the memory tests in a quiet space, but the surveys can be done on the go on the way to work, if that’s the only time you have!

HOW DO YOU PLAN ON USING THE INFORMATION I PROVIDE YOU?

We will be using your data in a few exciting ways: the first, will be to track your progress over time in relation to your genetic data. In order to fulfil our requirements as researchers, we will be publishing our findings in scientific journals and uploading these publications to the website as we go. Our second way to use your information is to give back information on how you’re progressing in relation to the rest of the group on the website. We are all about open science here! Every time ~500 new participants get involved with the website, we’ll recompute all the averages so that you can determine where you sit in relation to the group. One thing to remember is that our website is NOT a diagnostic service, and is not intended to be used in this way. It is simply our way of giving back to you so that you feel that our work is not a “black box”, but a valuable interaction between scientist and volunteer. Without your involvement, there would be no data!

HOW SECURE IS MY PERSONAL INFORMATION?

Any personal and identifying information of yours (name, date of birth, email and home address, phone number) will be kept in password-protected files stored on a secure server at the Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health. Only authorized members of our research team who are named on our ethics application will have access to your personal and identifying information. Additionally, your personal and identifying information will be stored separately from your testing data (i.e. your responses to questionnaires, your performance on memory and thinking tests). We have also encrypted your personal identifying information so that if there were a security breach, your information would not be traceable. We are doing everything in our power to keep your information safe, and are following Australian Medical Record Safety guidelines and are always being monitored and randomly audited by our Human Research Ethics Committees at Monash University. For any concerns or queries, please email us directly at healthybrainproject@monash.edu

WHAT IS YOUR CONNECTION TO MONASH UNIVERSITY, THE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE AND THE FLOREY INSTITUTE?

Drs Lim and Buckley were researchers based at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health and the University of Melbourne. As such, the Healthy Brain Project was established as a study within these institutions. Since May 2020, we have moved to the Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, at the School of Psychological Sciences, Monash University. We would like to acknowledge the support provided by the Florey and the University of Melbourne from 2016 to 2020. We would also like to express our excitement for the new opportunities that being at the Turner Institute will provide our research team, and the Healthy Brain Project more generally. Our research continues to be monitored and ethically approved by Monash University (HREC: 26855)

HOW CAN I CONTACT YOU FOR MORE INFORMATION?

If you have any additional questions or concerns about your participation, please email us at healthybrainproject@monash.edu