Cuba and its Contributions to Global Brain Health

Dementias and other neurodegenerative diseases are now considered a health priority. It is estimated that by the middle of the century between 115 and 135 million people will suffer from some of the brain-related diseases.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), one of the first causes is the aging of the population, due to the increase in life expectancy, especially in countries with better incomes.

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia: it accounts for an estimated 60 to 70 percent of cases, according to the data from that UN entity.

These diseases have a physical, psychological, social and economic impact not only on the people who suffer from it, but also on their caregivers, their families and society in general.

Currently, several global projects are dedicated to the study of the brain and its diseases, which require very high funding. Scientists themselves consider, in the face of an emergency, that each study should share its data, due to the extent of the research, which seeks to investigate in detail the structure and functions of the human brain through advanced neuroimaging equipment.

Cuba, a small country with scarce financial resources, has been part of a tri-national project since 2017, along with China and Canada, focused on searching, comparing, examining and recording data.

Each nation provides funding to support joint research over the next three years, provided by the Quebec Science Fund, the Chinese National Science Foundation and Cuba’s Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment, through the Science and Technological Innovation Fund.

After two years of experience, the project is already providing the first results for the creation of a common data centre. Canada provides five pentabytes of data and neuroimages of some four thousand people from eight countries hace already been obtained.

With a situation similar to that of the developed world because of its high life expectancy rates, 78.9 years on average, the island’s health authorities approved in late 2018 the brain dysfunction and brain mapping program, which seeks to attain a better diagnosis of diseases.

The idea is to come up with a better strategy for prevention, Cuban scientist Pedro Valdés, who has directed the Cuban Brain Mapping Project since 1990, explained.

Valdés shared criteria on the concept of global brain precision health, a preventive strategy to stop the advance of neurodegenerative diseases.

It is a new approach to health as was the sequencing of the human genome, which opened a new path in the biological sciences.

In this case of precision health, the use of genetic markers is sought to predict when a person is at greater risk of suffering the disease, to select better treatment and subsequent monitoring of the disease, based on analysis and research on the genome, brain connections and personal experiences of each individual.

However, the concept is approached by the developed world with a different vision: as a precision medicine for rich countries.

The issue should be approached, explained Valdés, from two points of view, the first that can not be an elite project, but has to be for large populations. We are not interested in people having medicine, but in people having health because it is a broader concept.

When we use medicine, it is because we are in the presence of a disease and the criterion is global health, he said.

The role of the island’s scientific community in brain studies is to provide knowledge, he said. We will not have economic resources but we will have intellectual resources, the strength of our universities, in addition to a health system, whose fundamental principle is the preventive work from the program of the family doctor.

In his opinion, it is necessary to move more clinical tests for the prevention of these diseases and to attach this system to the primary care program in order to achieve better treatments.

(Taken from PL in Spanish)