Marianna Baum
Florida International University, FL·Public Health & Epidemiology
People with HIV are living into middle and older age, and many also use cocaine. Both HIV and cocaine use are tied to trouble with thinking and memory, called neurocognitive impairment, and to physical frailty, a decline in physical reserve linked to disability and death.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Neuroscience
- Topics
cocaine use
substance use
cognitive frailty
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2030
What they work on
- Track over time, in people with and without HIV and cocaine use in the MASH cohort, the epigenetic patterns (chemical marks on DNA) that differ between groups and predict the onset of cognitive frailty.
- Test whether those epigenetic signatures forecast structural and functional MRI brain patterns, and whether these in turn predict later declines in cognition and physical frailty, accounting for sex and poly-social risk.
- Expand the Miami Adult Studies on HIV cohort to 1,879 participants with added recruitment of women, following HIV status, substance use, emerging comorbidities and social risk at biannual visits.
- Translate results into practice with community end-users through a Health Promotion Research Center framework, including colocated HIV and substance abuse care and early diagnostic markers of cognitive frailty.
More about the research
When the two occur together the condition is called cognitive frailty, and it is poorly understood. This project continues the Miami Adult Studies on HIV (MASH) cohort, the only cohort in the South funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, to find biological markers that forecast who develops it. The cohort of 1,439 adults is split among people with HIV who use cocaine, people with HIV who do not, cocaine users without HIV, and people with neither, all seen twice a year. Its infrastructure holds more than 8,000 visits, over 500,000 biospecimens, more than 900 MRI scans, microbiome and epigenetic data, and over 6,000 variables covering HIV, substance use, structural factors and comorbidities.
Why it matters
People with HIV who also use cocaine face elevated risk of cognitive decline and disability, and women in this group are especially understudied. Epigenetic and imaging markers that flag cognitive frailty early could support earlier diagnosis, better prediction of clinical trajectories, and precision treatment. Findings could also guide practical changes such as placing HIV care and substance abuse treatment in the same setting in Miami-Dade, a priority area for ending the HIV epidemic.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Mary Masters
Albert Einstein College of Medicine, NY·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Use user-centered design with clinic stakeholders to select implementation strategies for a clinic-based screening process for cognitive and physical function impairment among people with HIV aged 50 and older.
Deborah R. Gustafson
SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University, NY·Public Health & Epidemiology
Investigate cardiovascular and pulmonary (heart and lung) health outcomes in people living with HIV, using decades of follow-up data from the Brooklyn site of the MACS/WIHS Combined Cohort Study (MWCCS).
Pariya Wheeler
University of Alabama at Birmingham, AL·Public Health & Epidemiology
Test which brain pathways, such as neurotransmitter loss, neurotoxic metabolites and nerve cell damage, link chronic immune activation (for example IL-6 and sCD163) to cognitive impairment in about 500 women from the Women's Interagency HIV Study.
The school
Florida International University: 9 labs on PI Pages, $326M a year on research, 264 research doctorates a year.
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