GameChanger round 2 coming soon!

It’s been more than a year since the start of GameChanger. Over 16,000 people across the UK have played our smartphone tasks to help GameChanger researchers, based at the University of Oxford, learn about how our thinking abilities change as we get older.

Starting in January we’ll begin emailing people, inviting them to get involved again. Can you donate five minutes of your day, every day, for a month?

We want to understand how much people’s thinking abilities might change between one year and the next. Understanding how patterns of change differ from person to person is really important for helping us detect patterns of change linked to dementia. This research can improve diagnosis and help develop new treatments for dementia. Just five minutes a day could change lives.

By taking part in GameChanger round 2, you can make the data you provide even more valuable to dementia research. If you joined last autumn, we’ll be in touch in January with all the details for how to sign up – so look out for our email. If you joined GameChanger more recently, we’ll be in touch when your second year of GameChanger is ready to begin.

Each GameChanger participant is unique - if we collect information from the same individual twice, we are in a much better position to understand how individual characteristics shape how our thinking and memory change as we get older. Smartphones help us collect this longer-term information easily, in large numbers of volunteers – this is very hard achieve using traditional clinic-based tests. Understanding healthy ageing will allow us to compare results with people at risk of dementia and detect patterns of early change seen in Alzheimer’s disease.

Actor Kevin Whately, whose mother had Alzheimer’s Disease, is supporting the GameChanger study:

"Over 16,000 people played brain games to support dementia research in the GameChanger study. One year later and it’s time for GameChanger round 2. Giving just five minutes a day will help us advance dementia research again."

Any questions about GameChanger? Read the full FAQ here.

Otherwise if you have any questions about dementia and support for people who are affected by dementia visit www.alzheimers.org.uk or call the Alzheimer’s Society’s national helpline on 0300 222 11 22.

Thank you for supporting dementia research!