Laura Mosqueda
University of Southern California, CA·Public Health & Epidemiology
About one in ten older Americans experiences mistreatment, and for people living with dementia the rate approaches half. The person causing harm is most often a family caregiver, and such caregivers are typically remorseful afterward — which suggests that much of this harm is preventable rather than malicious.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Social Science
- Topics
elder mistreatment
elder abuse
dementia
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Develop and feasibility-test a brief evidence-based Risk Assessment Screen that primary care clinics can use to identify care partners of people living with dementia who are at risk of inflicting elder mistreatment.
- Build and pilot a three-component intervention combining a solution-focused website, one to three care navigator visits delivered at home or by technology, and education for the clinical care team with two-month follow-up.
- Assemble an Outcome Tool from validated measures of modifiable risk factors for caregiver-inflicted mistreatment and use it to measure change in risk over time.
- Test effectiveness of the screen alone and the screen plus intervention in a cluster randomized controlled trial of Los Angeles County primary care clinics, including assessment of potential harms.
- Collect exploratory qualitative data from participants to clarify the mechanisms of risk and of change produced by the screen and intervention.
More about the research
This project tests whether primary care clinics can be used to spot caregivers at risk and intervene before mistreatment occurs.
Why it matters
Elder mistreatment worsens older adults' health, wellbeing, and survival, and carries costs to families, health systems, and society. By intervening with family caregivers of people living with dementia — the group at highest risk — through routine primary care visits, this work could yield a practical screening tool and prevention program that clinics can adopt, addressing modifiable risk factors before harm occurs.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
David Hancock
Weill Medical College of Cornell University, NY·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
Develop and refine candidate items for the EM-AD, a new measure of elder mistreatment tailored to dementia family caregivers, using feedback from caregivers and geriatric professionals to establish that the items cover the right content.
Ronald Acierno
University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, TX·Psychology
Select and support two to three pilot projects each year that develop behavioral interventions for elder mistreatment at stages 0–2 of the NIH Stage Model for Behavioral Intervention Development.
Safiyyah Okoye
Drexel University, PA·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
Characterize housing disrepair, such as roof, wall, heating or plumbing problems, among U.S. older adults, and test its links to functional disability in low-income older adults.
The school
University of Southern California: 47 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 882 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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