Phillip Cantu
University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, TX·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
Spotting dementia early often takes more than a single memory test. Family members and other close contacts, called informants, notice everyday changes in memory and problem-solving that a brief questionnaire can miss.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Social Science
- Topics
dementia
mild cognitive impairment
informant assessment
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2029
What they work on
- Describe informant assessments of cognition, reports from family members or caregivers, in the Mexican Health and Aging Study and examine how they vary between older adults with and without dementia.
- Estimate the prevalence of mild cognitive impairment and dementia among older adults in Mexico using informant assessments alongside in-depth cognitive testing from the MexCog auxiliary study.
- Test whether adding informant assessments improves the performance of the survey's cognitive screening, especially for marginal cases, using statistical methods for survey validation.
More about the research
Large surveys that follow aging populations rarely use these reports to their full potential, which leaves borderline cases hard to classify. This mentored career-development project asks how much informant reports add when estimating how common mild cognitive impairment and dementia are in a population, with findings intended to carry over to U.S. studies and to Mexican Americans.
Why it matters
Reliable counts of mild cognitive impairment and dementia underpin planning for healthcare services and dementia care. Demonstrating when informant reports sharpen cognitive screening could help population studies, including those of Mexican Americans and other U.S. groups, flag early warning signs sooner and classify ambiguous cases more accurately.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Lisa Berkman
Harvard University, MA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Continue following the HAALSI Agincourt cohort of older South Africans for 13 years, adding a third HCAP wave with biomarkers and neuroimaging to study how dementia interacts with HIV and cardiometabolic disorders.
Narges Razavian
New York University, NY·Computer Science
Run a pilot embedded pragmatic clinical trial in primary care to test the acceptability, usability and adoption of an existing AI/machine learning tool and decision support for detecting cognitive impairment.
Evan Jordan
Indiana University, IN·Public Health & Epidemiology
Determine where, when, and what environmental stressors are experienced by 300 urban and 300 rural Indiana residents with mild cognitive impairment, using the STRIVE smartphone app, GPS tracking, and smartwatch data.
The school
University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston: 14 labs on PI Pages, $241M a year on research, 141 research doctorates a year.
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