Shannon Risacher
Wake Forest University, NC·Neuroscience
Alzheimer's disease (AD) begins damaging the brain years before memory problems become obvious. New treatments may work best if given in these early, silent (preclinical) or mildly symptomatic (prodromal) stages.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
Psychology
- Topics
Alzheimer's disease
mild cognitive impairment
biomarkers
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Nov 2026
What they work on
- Test whether changes in vision, smell and hearing in preclinical and prodromal Alzheimer's disease are driven by amyloid and tau buildup in the brain, measured by imaging, and by loss of brain tissue.
- Test whether altered connectivity within the brain's sensory networks is linked to multi-sensory function in older adults at early stages of Alzheimer's disease.
- Determine whether combining visual, olfactory and auditory measures predicts amyloid, tau, neurodegeneration and connectivity changes better than any single sensory test.
- Evaluate whether one-time and repeated sensory measures predict future cognitive decline, progression to clinical diagnosis and rate of brain atrophy.
More about the research
Doctors therefore need cheap, simple, non-invasive tests that flag who has early AD-related brain changes. Subtle declines in vision, smell and hearing may appear alongside, or even before, noticeable cognitive decline. Sensory tests are easy, inexpensive and non-invasive. However, they have not been compared thoroughly with modern brain imaging, and the different senses have not been tested together in the same people.
Why it matters
Simple tests of vision, smell and hearing could become low-cost, non-invasive screening tools for spotting Alzheimer's disease before major memory loss. Such tools could help doctors identify older adults who may benefit from early treatment or lifestyle changes. They could also help select participants for clinical trials of anti-amyloid and anti-tau therapies.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jessica Alber
University of Rhode Island, RI·Neuroscience
Identify differences in retinal imaging measures between older adults with preclinical Alzheimer's disease and cognitively unimpaired peers in the ARIAS cohort.
Qolamreza Ray Razlighi
Weill Medical College of Cornell University, NY·Neuroscience
Develop the Tau Progression Index (TPI), a single prognostic score that combines each person's MRI-based structural and functional brain connectivity with the regional patterns of amyloid-beta and tau seen on PET scans.
Esther Blessing
New York University, NY·Neuroscience
Verify that lower waking body temperature, measured with an ingestible telemetric thermometer, predicts tau tangles on [18F]-MK-6240 PET in 100 older adults who are cognitively normal or have mild cognitive impairment.
The school
Wake Forest University: 27 labs on PI Pages, $345M a year on research, 54 research doctorates a year.
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