George Manias

University of Piraeus, Greece

Title: Social Prescribing as a Mechanism for Agency-Centred Dementia and Frailty Prevention: The COMFORTage Approach

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Biography

George Manias holds an Assistant Professor position in the Jheronimus Academy of Data Science, Tilburg University, Netherlands, and is a Fellow Researcher of the University of Piraeus, Greece. He holds a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and an M.Sc. in Big Data and Analytics from the University of Piraeus, with a strong background in Data Science, Machine Learning (ML), and advanced analytics. He is an experienced Data Scientist specializing in developing AI-driven solutions, statistical modeling, and data-driven decision-making approaches in the healthcare domain. His main research interests lie in the domains of Natural Language Processing (NLP), Sentiment Analysis, Deep Learning, Large Language Models (LLMs), and Information Extraction. He is the Project Coordinator of the COMFORTage project, and he has coordinated and participated in other EU funded projects and prevention-oriented initiatives in healthy ageing, including a WHO High-Level Technical Workshop on rethinking prevention for dementia and frailty.

Abstract

Dementia and frailty prevention increasingly relies on AI-driven risk stratification, positioning older adults as recipients of externally generated predictions [1]. COMFORTage’s approach is grounded in reframing dementia as a lifelong, modifiable trajectory that begins decades before clinical diagnosis and going beyond treating it as late-life event [2]. The latter enables a shift from prevention and episodic clinical intervention toward continuous behavioural and social engagement across the life course [3]. Within this framework, social prescribing is one of several prevention leverage points, alongside biomarker-based risk assessment and early behavioural activation, connecting individuals at risk of cognitive or functional decline with tailored community, social and lifestyle activities that improve health literacy and self-management.

COMFORTage is piloting this approach across thirteen sites from 8 European countries and health-system contexts, with more than 1,900 participants recruited to date. This multi-site, multi-context design allows engagement patterns and implementation feasibility to be explored across different care-delivery settings and cultural ecosystems, addressing a limitation common to single-site social-prescribing studies. Comparability across sites is supported by a harmonised clinical assessment core of eleven validated instruments spanning physical activity, cognitive decline and reserve, frailty, cumulative illness burden, cardiovascular and nutritional risk, mood, alcohol use, and quality of life. Early implementation experience from the pilots already offers a preliminary insight, in which participant-centred feedback loops and informative biometrics (e.g., biological age) have been identified as key drivers of sustained engagement and retention, reinforcing that treating participants as active agents, and not only passive recipients, has a prominent effect on real-world implementation.

This presentation will describe the design of COMFORTage’s social prescribing pathway, the harmonised assessment framework supporting cross-site comparability, and early implementation experience across the pilot network, introducing agency and social connection as first-order targets in dementia and frailty prevention strategy [4].