Dementia the burden on societies challenges for research - Arfan Ikram - 24.10.2018

Podcasts from the«Bern Lectures in Health Science» – ISPM Bern

16 September 2020, Christian Wyniger, 9 views

Prof. Mohammad Arfan Ikram is Professor and Chair of Epidemiology at the department of Epidemiology, Erasmus MC Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He is also adjunct professor of Epidemiology at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health.

He is principal investigator of the Rotterdam Study, in which his research focuses on dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. He is also a key collaborator in the CHARGE (Cohorts for Heart and Aging Research in Genomic Epidemiology) consortium. His research focuses on investigating the etiology of neurologic diseases in the elderly, with a particular focus on dementia, Alzheimer disease, cognition and brain imaging. The main areas of research are to elucidate the earliest signs of brain diseases, before clinical symptoms are present, and to understand how these lead to clinical manifestation of disease. Moreover, he is interested in preclinical signs that can be used to identify persons at highest risk of developing disease. To this aim he has used data from the large population-based Rotterdam Study and Rotterdam Scan Study that have followed nearly 15,000 persons for a period of nearly 25 years. A main focus on his research has been the use of MRI-imaging to understand brain disease. Also, he has used neuropsychological testing, genome-wide, exome chip, DNA-methylation and sequencing technologies, and recently electronic gait assessments. Not only is he interested in how these pre-clinical markers lead to clinical disease, he also wants to disentangle the intricate relationships between these markers.

He has published over 400 international scientific papers (H-index = 51) and currently heads a research group of 13 PhD-students, 3 post-docs, 3 MSc-students, and 5 research staff.

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