Rhoda Au
Boston University, MA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Alzheimer's disease (AD) develops silently for decades before memory problems appear. Not everyone who carries risk markers goes on to develop dementia.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
Alzheimer's disease
dementia
preclinical Alzheimer's
- Grants
- 4 known grants, through Jul 2031
What they work on
- Collect digital cognitive metrics (dCog) from a digital recorder, digital pen and smartphone apps in the BU ADRC cohort, and compare people who are positive versus negative for the amyloid-tau-neurodegeneration (A/T/N) signature.
- Relate digital cognitive phenotypes to vascular risk factors and to brain regions measured on MRI, and build machine learning models that combine them with blood and imaging biomarkers to predict cognitive health.
- Add a lens amyloid beta eye scan, using a fluorescent amyloid-binding dye and a spectroscopic scanner, to the Framingham Heart Study Gen 3/Omni Gen 2 exam to detect early Alzheimer's-related amyloid buildup.
- Collect three years of smartphone cognitive data from middle-aged Framingham participants, and test whether features such as response times, errors and speech patterns identify lens-amyloid-positive or high-risk individuals.
- Extend long-term neuropsychological testing with digital voice and pen capture, neurological exams and brain MRI across surviving Framingham cohorts, while diagnosing new cases of mild cognitive impairment, dementia and Parkinson's disease.
- Profile cognition in people who are amyloid- or tau-positive by plasma, post-mortem tissue or PET to find patterns that separate those who progress to Alzheimer's from those who do not, using machine learning versus traditional statistics.
More about the research
Standard tests for the brain changes of AD, such as PET scans (brain imaging) or spinal fluid sampling, are expensive and invasive, and their cost has widened racial and ethnic gaps in who takes part in research. These grants ask whether cheap, scalable digital measures of thinking can detect AD earlier and better predict who will decline. The data come from smartphones, digital pens and voice recordings, analyzed with machine learning. The work draws on the Framingham Heart Study (FHS), a community study running for more than seven decades, and on the Boston University Alzheimer's Disease Research Center (BU ADRC).
Why it matters
Detecting Alzheimer's disease before symptoms appear may be key to treating or preventing it, especially as new drugs emerge. Low-cost digital tests on phones and pens, and an eye scan for amyloid, could offer scalable alternatives to costly PET scans and spinal taps. Such tools may help clinicians flag high-risk adults early, choose who is most likely to benefit from intervention, and include more diverse populations in research.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
David Geldmacher
University of Alabama at Birmingham, AL·Neuroscience
Enroll and follow about 525 community volunteers each year, cognitively unimpaired, with mild cognitive impairment or with mild dementia, at least 40% Black or African American, using standard national tests plus social determinants of health, body composition and actigraphy measures.
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.
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
Boston University: 26 labs on PI Pages, $784M a year on research, 630 research doctorates a year.
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