Joint academic collaboration between Japan and Denmark in the field of dementia research

Royal Danish Embassy in Japan and Healthcare Denmark, together with world leading hearing aid companies such as Demant, GN Hearing and Widex, have been organizing series of multi-stakeholder sessions on the important topic of hearing health since 2023. In those sessions, we have been covering topics such as "healthy ageing," “hearing loss/difficulty and dementia,” “penetration rate vs. satisfaction rate” as well as “guildelines.”

As part of the initiative, Royal Danish Embassy and Healthcare Denmark bridged the academia from Japan and Denmark, i.e. Professor Koichiro Wasano, MD, PhD. of the School of Medicine, Tokai University, together with Kasper Jørgensen, MSc, from the University of Copenhagen Dementia Research Centre (Denmark), who then conducted the captioned joint academic research.

The joint research has demonstrated that 38.9% of dementia cases in Japan are theoretically preventable through improvements in lifestyle and health-related factors. This conclusion was drawn from analyses based on Japanese public statistics and epidemiological data. The study identified hearing loss (6.7%) as the largest modifiable risk factor for dementia in Japan, followed by physical inactivity (6.0%) and high LDL cholesterol (4.5%). The findings further suggest that a uniform 10% reduction in these 14 modifiable risk factors could potentially prevent more than 200,000 future dementia cases nationwide.

These results were published on January 11, 2026, in the international medical journal
The Lancet Regional Health - Western Pacific.

You can read the full joint press release here.
Title of the joint press release:
Potential for Dementia Prevention in Japan
- Nearly 40% of Dementia Cases Are Preventable –
～Hearing Loss Identified as the Leading Risk Factor, Followed by Physical Inactivity～