Willa Brenowitz
Boston University, MA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Hearing and vision loss affect up to 40% of older adults and have been linked to a higher risk of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (AD/ADRD). If treating these sensory losses lowered dementia risk, that would be a simple and far-reaching prevention strategy, but whether it truly works is uncertain.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Neuroscience
- Topics
Alzheimer's disease
dementia
hearing loss
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2029
What they work on
- Estimate whether hearing and vision impairments increase the risk of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias, applying causal inference methods and data triangulation across three longitudinal cohort studies.
- Test whether treating sensory loss, through hearing aid use or cataract surgery, reduces dementia risk, using cohort data together with large samples linked to health care and genetic information.
- Examine whether these effects differ by genetic risk, cardiovascular risk factors and populations with health disparities, and quantify how much dementia could be prevented in each subgroup.
More about the research
Randomized trials of such long-term effects are hard to run. Observational data from large long-term studies can help, but only if analyses deal carefully with bias. One source of bias is confounding, when outside factors drive both sensory loss and dementia. Another is reverse causation, when early dementia itself causes the sensory measures to change. This project is part of the TIME-AD program.
Why it matters
Older adults with hearing or vision loss, and the health systems that serve them, could benefit from knowing whether hearing aids or cataract surgery lower dementia risk. The findings may show whether sensory care should be a priority in dementia prevention. They could also show which groups would gain the most, guiding efforts to reduce the population burden of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Medellena Glymour
Boston University, MA·Public Health & Epidemiology
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.
Pablo Martinez Amezcua
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Public Health & Epidemiology
Examine whether the association between hearing loss and cognitive decline over about six years in Hispanic adults differs by language acculturation, using HCHS/SOL data.
Naoko Muramatsu
University of Illinois Chicago, IL·Public Health & Epidemiology
Build behavioral and social research infrastructure for Alzheimer's disease and related dementias at the University of Illinois Chicago, linking population science and health promotion approaches.
The school
Boston University: 26 labs on PI Pages, $784M a year on research, 630 research doctorates a year.
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