Hillard Kaplan
Chapman University, CA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Nearly everything known about dementia risk comes from industrialized countries. In those populations, people get little exercise and suffer relatively few infections.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Neuroscience
Social Science
- Topics
Alzheimer's disease
dementia
cognitive impairment
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2027
What they work on
- Test whether high physical activity slows brain shrinkage and lowers Alzheimer's risk in Tsimane and Moseten adults by reducing body fat, artery disease and inflammation, using repeated CT scans and medical exams.
- Test whether viral and bacterial infections increase brain shrinkage and dementia risk through amyloid production and artery disease, and whether intestinal worm infections or exercise reduce these effects.
- Test whether women's higher risk of cognitive impairment stems from stronger inflammatory responses to infection, using blood amyloid and tau biomarkers and gene expression measures.
- Determine how the APOE ε4 gene variant interacts with sex and infection burden to affect immune responses, blood lipids and dementia risk in a food-limited, high-infection environment.
More about the research
Studying communities whose way of life resembles the human preindustrial past can show how factors such as physical activity and infection shape brain aging. This project follows the Tsimane and Moseten, two Indigenous populations in South America. Their daily lives demand heavy physical activity and expose them to many infections. It is described as the first population-based study of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias in a setting where infection is a primary contributor to risk.
Why it matters
Learning why dementia is rare in these populations could reveal how exercise, infection and inflammation affect the risk of Alzheimer's disease. This may point to modifiable risk factors relevant to people everywhere. The work could also help explain why women face higher risk and how the APOE ε4 gene variant behaves in different environments. The shared biobank will support future studies.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Shannon Risacher
Wake Forest University, NC·Neuroscience
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.
Thomas M Wisniewski
New York University, NY·Medicine & Clinical Research
Compare cognitive and neuropsychological performance yearly over five years among older adults with post-COVID cognitive symptoms, infected adults without symptoms and uninfected controls, using the CDR-SB and Uniform Data Set Version 3.
Jaime Ramos-Cejudo
New York University, NY·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether circulating markers of vascular and immune dysfunction, including platelet aggregation, neutrophil activity and blood proteomic profiles, are associated with MRI measures of cerebrovascular burden in the Framingham Heart Study and the cardiovascular-risk-enriched ARISE-DP cohort.
The school
Chapman University: 2 labs on PI Pages, $48M a year on research, 44 research doctorates a year.
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