title: Is dementia research ready for big data approaches?
abstract: The "big data" paradigm has gained a lot of attention recently, in particular in those areas of biomedicine where we face clear unmet medical needs. Coined as a new paradigm for complex problem solving, big data approaches seem to open promising perspectives in particular for a better understanding of complex diseases such as Alzheimer's disease and other dementias. In this commentary, we will provide a brief overview on big data principles and the potential they may bring to dementia research, and - most importantly - we will do a reality check in order to provide an answer to the question of whether dementia research is ready for big data approaches.
authors.affiliation: Department of Bioinformatics, Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing (SCAI), 53754, Sankt Augustin, Germany. martin.hofmann-apitius@scai.fraunhofer.de.
authors.forename: Martin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Hofmann-Apitius
mesh_terms: D000066949:Biobehavioral Sciences / Q000379:methods*; D035843:Biomedical Research; D003704:Dementia; D006801:Humans; D013223:Statistics as Topic / Q000379:methods*; D013673:Technology Assessment, Biomedical