Medellena Glymour

What they work on

1. Estimate how low-risk drinking, unhealthy drinking and alcohol use disorder each affect dementia risk, triangulating across ten cohorts, including Kaiser Permanente records and the UK Biobank, using doubly robust and instrumental variable methods.
2. Test whether dementia risk depends on drink type, binge or blackout drinking, years of drinking, and personal factors such as genetic risk, sex, education, cannabis or medication use.
3. Estimate how much dementia across U.S. adults and higher-risk subgroups could be prevented by changes in alcohol use, using population attributable fractions (the share of cases due to a risk factor) and transport estimators.
4. Strengthen causal evidence on depression, vision and hearing impairment, and social isolation as dementia risk factors in the TIME-AD program, comparing genetic and policy natural experiments with observational models.
5. Study how race and ethnicity, rural residence, disability, life-course social resources and policies shape dementia onset and outcomes, through BU-SHARP pilot projects and interdisciplinary collaboration.

More about the research

Why it matters

Dementia prevention depends on knowing which risk factors actually cause disease. This work could tell clinicians and policymakers whether reducing drinking, treating depression, correcting vision or hearing loss, or reducing social isolation would lower dementia rates. It could also show which groups would benefit most. The aim is to guide prevention strategies and policy, and to help reduce disparities in cognitive aging by race, rural residence and disability.

Known grants

From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.

Closest labs

The school

Boston University: 26 labs on PI Pages, $784M a year on research, 630 research doctorates a year.

More about Boston University

Reach out

A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.