A Comparison of Lifestyle Interventions for Alzheimer's Disease Extracted from Clinical Notes and Literature

The purpose of this study is to compare the lifestyle risk factors and intervention strategies of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) found from literature and from clinical notes. A natural language processing (NLP) approach was applied to extract previously identified risk factors from a corpus of clinical notes of 261 AD patients at Mayo Clinic. We find that 18 lifestyle risk factors have been reported in the clinical notes such as dietary factors, sedentary behavior, sleep disorder and substance abuse. However, rare risk factors such as magnesium/selenium deficiency have not been reported in the corpus. The results show that many factors which have been proved to be correlated to AD in the literature have not been well measured in the clinical practice.