Dementia Research

Senior Research Fellow at UCL, Jul 2020 – Present

In-progress.

My current research is on the disease progression of dementia, in particular Alzheimer’s disease (AD), a chronic neurodegenerative disease which is the cause of 60 – 70% of cases of dementia with currently about 47 million affected individuals worldwide.

The variability in AD onset, mechanism and clinical expression has been a key confound preventing successful outcomes in most treatment trials to date. The onset symptoms of AD vary across individuals, typically with memory problems as the one of the first signs of cognitive impairment, while changes in the brain and other biomarkers may begin to emerge a decade or more before onset.

My current research project aims to untangle the heterogeneity in AD by finding subtypes of the clinical appearance of AD suggested by the trajectories of brain imaging, fluid biomarkers and measurements of cognitive capability. We then study how other risk factors (including comorbidities, life-style factors and genetics) influence the patterns of brain shrinkage and loss of brain function years before the disease becomes severe, aiming to provide insights to potential lifestyle interventions at early stages that may affect or delay disease onset, and will enable the enrichment of future clinical trials for specific groups of patients who are likely to benefit from a particular treatment.