Frequently Asked Questions

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Where did you get my contact details?  (Only applicable to FAMILY cohort participants)

 

We obtained your contact details from the FAMILY cohort following the collaborative agreements of data access. Please visit the FAMILY Cohort for more information.

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Your personal details will be kept private and secure at all times and only be used for the purposes of this iMAP research study. If you do not wish to participate in this research, all your personal details will be securely deleted in our iMAP database once the recruitment period has ended.

 

The iMAP Hong Kong study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of The University of Hong Kong/Hospital Authority Hong Kong West Cluster (HKU/HA HKW IRB). By using the FAMILY cohort, we could identify specific people (50-79 years old), living in the targeted neighbourhoods and phone them. That’s the only information the FAMILY cohort has provided us, just enough to post our letters of invitation and reach you via phone.

 

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I received a letter. What now? (Only applicable to FAMILY cohort participants)

 

We’ll phone you within a week to get to know your interest regarding participating in our study. Also, during the phone call, we’ll preliminary screen your eligibility for being one of our participants. If you can’t wait until we contact you, you can surely get in touch by phoning us or emailing us (as you can tell, we’re keen to hear from you) – the details are in your invitation letter. If you are interested in the study but don’t have time at the moment, please let us know and we can contact you again at a more convenient time. Even if you are not interested we would still like to hear from you – we can ensure you don’t get reminders and remove you off our contact list More detail can be found here.

 

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Can I give my letter to someone else? (Only applicable to FAMILY cohort participants)

No, it is important for the integrity of the iMAP study that the specific people we have chosen are those on whom we collect data. Actually, it’s not specifically about you; our randomisation process chose you – it might equally have chosen someone in the house next door to you or over your back fence. This means people cannot volunteer purely because they are interested in the study. It also means you cannot pass your letter to someone else among your family or friends, and you cannot help us by recruiting your friends. However, we are keen to hear from others with an interest in the topic because there will be other related studies coming up. If you are interested (and did receive a letter addressed to you), but don’t have the time right now, please get back to us anyway and we can discuss when a better time might be.

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Can I sign up to participate?

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Answer to this question depends on whether you are a FAMILY cohort's participant or not.

 

To FAMILY cohort's participants: No, if you haven’t (yet) received an invitation letter personally addressed to you then unfortunately you cannot volunteer. The iMAP study is focusing on people aged 50-79 years living in one of our 112 target neighbourhoods. As we cannot recruit everyone living in a target neighbourhood, a certain number of names were selected at random. We selected them at random rather than based on interest to avoid biases, such as recruiting people that are interested in the study because they are physically active.

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To Non-FAMILY cohort's persons: Yes. First of all. We're happy to hear that you are interested in our study. We will verify your eligibility based on your current residential address and other criteria.

 

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Where are you recruiting?

 

We are looking for participants from 112 target neighbourhoods spread across the whole Hong Kong. Those areas were chosen to ensure a mix of neighbourhood walkability (how easy it is to walk around the area), pollution (particulates and gases from sources such as industry and vehicle exhausts), and socioeconomic status (based on census data from the Census and Statistics Department, HKSAR).

 

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Why specific neighbourhoods?

 

We have chosen 112 neighbourhoods across Hong Kong. A ‘neighbourhood’ is based on Tertiary Planning Units (TPUs) by the Planning Department of the Government of the HKSAR . For town planning purpose, the whole territory of Hong Kong is divided into 289 TPUs. We chose 112 TPUs based  on existing data on particulate air pollution (particulates are very fine “chunks” in the air from industry, transport, etc.), walkability (how easy it is to be a pedestrian around the neighbourhood), and community socioeconomic status (average household income). The 112 selected areas consist of mixtures of high and low levels of each of these three features, giving us a good representation of residents and neighbourhoods.

 

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What will you be asking of participants?

 

The iMAP study is a very comprehensive study – it needs to have international significance and to provide the answers we are seeking about factors involved in cognitive health, especially cognitive decline associated with ageing.

 

We are asking participants to come into the testing centre (LB-03, Patrick Manson Building, 7 Sassoon Road, Pokfulam, Hong Kong) for a 90-120 minute session that includes an interview, a series of thinking and memory tasks, a saliva sample for DNA, and measurement of attributes such as height and balance. We then provide participants with four small devices to wear during the following week to collect information on sleep, activity, time spent sitting, and where they go. After that, participants come back for another 90-120 minute interview about their neighbourhood and other places they regularly visit and what they do there.

 

One-third of the participants then volunteer to get an MRI scan of their brain. Then we do it all again two years later to look for changes.

 

So yes, it is a big commitment, but it’s a couple of intensive periods rather than a long-term engagement.

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What’s in it for me?

 

We’ll give you HK$400 cash at the end of the second testing session, with another HK$400 in 2 years’ time after the second round of data collection. There will be an extra HK$150 if you are selected and completed each of 2 MRI scans, also 2 years apart. A potential total of HK$1,100!

 

We’ll also give you a report on your physical activity, sitting and sleep patterns from the monitoring week.

 

And finally, you will have the satisfaction of knowing you’ve made a vital contribution to a major international research study on a very important and current topic that affects us all. (And you’ll help us beat Melbourne and Barcelona in our friendly little recruitment competition.)

 

 

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What’s the DNA test about and will I get the results?

 

There’s a protein called apolipoprotein E (APOE) that plays a range of roles in the human body. The APOE gene (part of your DNA) is an element of the control mechanism for how that protein is manufactured and deployed. There are 3 versions of that gene. One of those variants appears to be implicated in the development of diseases like Alzheimer’s disease – click here for more information. We will use a DNA test to discover which version of the APOE gene you have. It will be just one of the bits of data we will be analysing. We’ll take your DNA via a saliva sample – you simply spit into a tube.

 

Having the particular gene variant does not necessarily mean you will develop Alzheimer’s disease. It is a risk factor, like smoking and lack of physical activity also seem to be risk factors. Further, knowing you have the gene won’t change anything since you can’t alter your DNA. But you can do something about other risk factors like smoking and sedentary behaviour! And finally, the science is not yet good enough to know how big a risk factor this gene variant is – it certainly can’t be used to diagnose or even provide an early warning of Alzheimer’s disease. Thus, it is currently used more as a research tool. Taking all of this together, we will not inform participants which gene variant they have. This is common practice in research studies. The information we give you about your activity levels, how much sitting you do and how well you sleep will be vastly more useful to you as health information.

 

 

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What is the MRI scan for and will I get the results?

 

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) uses magnetic fields and radio waves to image the inside of the body without the need for radiation such as x-rays. So long as metal is not brought near the scanner (including metal within the body), it is considered a safe procedure. We will be using MRI to examine brain structure and evidence of past events like microbleeds, which can be implicated in cognitive decline and conditions like dementia. We will be particularly interested in any physiological changes between the MRI scans two years apart that might be linked to changes in thinking and memory abilities. The scans will not be used for diagnostic purposes, but they will make the iMAP study more comprehensive. We will not be giving you a copy of your MRI scans because you can’t really do anything with them. However, a qualified radiologist at the HKU MRI Unit (where we have elected to have the MRI scans done) will look your scans over before we add them to our data. In the unlikely event that anything of concern is noticed, you will be contacted to discuss it.

 

 

Will I get the results for the memory and thinking tasks?

 

We will ask you to complete a range of memory and thinking tasks during the first testing session (and then two years later to see if there are any changes). Knowing the results for any of those tests is of little value from a diagnostic point of view. A health professional testing memory and thinking, in order to make a clinical diagnosis, might use these or similar tests, but they would be part of a larger set of tests and other measures – they wouldn’t rely on results from individual tests. So, because the results for these tests are mostly meaningless to you, but very important for us as a piece of data, we won’t be providing the results. 

 

 

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Will doing the genetic test affect my health or life insurance policy?

 

No. Whilst genetic testing can provide a wealth of information, we are only collecting your APOE gene variant. The results of this test will not be provided to anyone.

 

 

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Where does the testing take place?

 

We are located in Patrick Manson Building, 7 Sassoon Road, Pokfulam, Hong Kong; near the Queen Mary Hospital, in the medical campus of The University of Hong Kong.  

 

 

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Ethics approval

 

The iMAP study was granted research ethics approval by the Institutional Review Board of The University of Hong Kong/Hospital Authority Hong Kong West Cluster in February 2019 (Reference Number: UW 19-126).  

 

 

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