Recordings

For the best viewing experience, make sure that you access MELODEM via this website (it should have “sites” in the URL):   https://sites.bu.edu/melodem/

2024

March 21, 2024: Erin Ferguson is a PhD candidate in Epidemiology and Translational Science at the University of California, San Francisco. Her doctoral work applies causal inference methods in electronic health records to answer methodologically complex questions about Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias. Her present work investigates a source of bias epidemiologists rarely consider: our own decision-making. This talk will: 1) address the problem our own decisions pose in the context of reproducibility and bias, 2) introduce specification analysis and vibrations of effect, and 3) walk through an example related to statin use and dementia risk.  She presented her talk, “Robustness of effect estimates to varying model specifications: An application to statin use and risk of dementia using data from a large healthcare plan”.

Erin Ferguson

March 7, 2024: Dr. Joan Monin is an Associate Professor at the Yale School of Public Health. Her research fuses survey methods with experimental approaches to understand the emotional mechanisms that influence health in older adult relationships. Professor Monin’s work is particularly focused on the dynamics between caregivers and care recipients in the context of early-stage dementia.  She presented her talk, “Systolic Blood Pressure During Conversations between Older Adults Living with Cognitive Impairment and their Children: Associations with Attachment Security”.

Joan Monin

February 29, 2024: Dr. Eleanor Hayes-Larson is a postdoctoral fellow in epidemiology at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. Her research includes work to understand psychosocial determinants of dementia in diverse populations, as well as methodological work focused on understanding and improving tools for causal inference in dementia research, using both statistical simulation studies and empirical data analysis.  She presented her talk, “Implications of timescale choice for estimated effects of exposures on rate of cognitive change among older adults: Results from the 2022 MELODEM Data Workshop”.

Eleanor Hayes-Larson

February 1, 2024:  A special debate and discussion featuring Dr. David Wallon of the Rouen University Hospital in France, and Dr. Vincent Planche of Bordeaux University Hospital in France.  The topic of the discussion was, “Are anti-amyloid immunotherapies “disease modifying” or symptomatic treatments of Alzheimer’s Disease?”

Dr. David Wallon is a neurologist and Director of the Memory Resource and Research Center at the Rouen University Hospital. He is also co-director of the National Reference Center for Young Alzheimer’s Patients (CNR-MAJ), a center of excellence for specific issues related to early onset Alzheimer’s disease (EOAD), including genetics. After obtaining his doctorate in medicine from the University of Rouen-Normandy in 2011, he began his research on the genetics of EOAD characterizing the clinical manifestations associated with rare autosomal dominant forms. He obtained a PhD in Neurosciences from the University of Rouen Normandy in 2014 and then studied the brain imaging of EOAD patients at UCL in London in 2015. He is now also focusing on cerebral amyloid angiopathy, a disease with mechanisms in common with Alzheimer’s disease, to improve diagnosis and understanding, by determining the genetic factors potentially involved in this vascular pathology.

Dr. Vincent Planche is a researcher and neurologist at the Institute of Neurodegenerative Diseases, and head of the Memory Clinic at Bordeaux University Hospital. He is also currently Associate Professor of neurology at Bordeaux University and researcher in the Institute of Neurodegenerative Diseases. His research focuses on the pathophysiology of neurodegenerative diseases, using both pre-clinical approaches on animal models and clinical studies on patients with neurodegenerative diseases, using fluid biomarkers and structural MRI. While he was initially working on Multiple Sclerosis, he is now interested in tauopathies in general and Alzheimer’s disease in particular.

David Wallon & Vincent Planche

January 18, 2024:  Dr, Maria Glymour  is Professor and Chair of the Department of Epidemiology at Boston University School of Public Health, and co-founder of the MELODEM Initiative. Her research focuses on how social factors experienced across the life course—from infancy to adulthood—influence cognitive function, dementia, stroke, and other health outcomes in old age.  She is particularly interested in education and other exposures amenable to policy interventions. A separate theme of her research focuses on overcoming methodological problems encountered in analyses of social determinants of health, Alzheimer’s disease, and dementia. For many reasons, research focusing on life course epidemiology as well as cognitive aging introduces substantial methodological challenges.  She presented her talk on “Evidence Triangulation”.  She was joined by Sirena Gutierrez, a current PhD candidate in Epidemiology and Translational Science at the University of California San Francisco.

Maria Glymour

2023

December 14, 2023:  Dr. Rachel Whitmer, is Professor of Public Health Sciences and Neurology, Chief of the Division of Epidemiology at the University of California Davis School of Medicine and Co-Director of the UC Davis Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. Dr. Whitmer uses lifecourse epidemiological methods to reduce inequities in brain aging; through study of dementia incidence, cognitive aging, neuroimaging, and brain pathology in diverse communities, those with diabetes, and the oldest-old. She is leading several lifecourse studies of cognitive aging and ADRD in diverse populations.

Rachel Whitmer

November 30, 2023:  Dr. Zachary Kunicki is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University where he also serves as the assistant director of the Quantitative Science Program.  His talk, “Understanding Normative Cognitive Aging” focuses on the challenges of identifying a trajectory of normative cognitive aging, or cognitive aging in the absence of a neurocognitive disorder using the Children of the Depression cohort of the Health and Retirement Study.

Zachary Kunicki

November 16, 2023:  Dr. Carole Dufouil is an epidemiologist, biostatistician, and research director at the Bordeaux Population Health Inserm Center, as well as co-director of the VINTAGE team, and co-founder of the MELODEM Initiative.  Dr. Dufouil will present an update on the Memento Cohort and Data Access procedures.

Carole Dufouil

October 19th, 2023: Dr. Khadka will discuss quantile regressions as a tool to assess how the educational attainment-cognitive decline relationship varies along the cognition distribution and will also present an empirical example demonstrating these ideas in which he evaluates the effect of Vietnam-era G.I. Bill eligibility, a large-scale educational intervention in the US, on later-life, age-related memory decline.

Aayush Khadka

October 5th, 2023: Dr. Paloma Rojas-Saunero, a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Epidemiology, Fielding School of Public health, UCLA will be presenting on “Effect of incident stroke on the risk of dementia over a period of 10 years of follow-up in a cohort of Asian American and white older adults in California.” Dr. Paloma Rojas-Saunera’s work focuses on how to extend the target trial framework and causal inference methods to study social determinants and cardiometabolic disorders in dementia and other aging related outcomes.

Paloma Rojas-Saunero

September 21st, 2023: Dr. Suzanne Judd, professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Dr. Judd will be introducing us to two amazing cohort studies on which she is a PI: REGARDS and RURAL. Her research focuses on racial and regional differences in brain health with a particular focus on nutritional drivers of differences.

Suzanne Judd

May 4th, 2023: Elizabeth Rose Mayeda, University of California, Los Angeles, Fielding School of Public Health will be presenting on “How much does amyloid burden predict memory decline at the population level? A transportability analysis.”

Elizabeth Rose Mayeda (email for recording)

April 20th, 2023: Jennifer J. Manly, Department of Neurology and the Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer’s Disease and the Aging Brain, Columbia University,  “Methods for Estimating National Prevalence of Dementia and MCI from the Harmonized Cognitive Assessment Protocol Project.”

Jennifer J. Manly

April 6th, 2023: Maude Wagner, BPH Research Center, Bordeaux University, “Using Longitudinal Continuous Measures to Capture Key Complementary Dimensions of Cognitive Resilience to AD Neuropathology”

Maude Wagner

March 16th, 2023: Roch A. Nianogo, Fielding School of Public Health, UCLA, “Risk Factors Associated with Alzheimer Disease and Related Dementias by Sex and Race and Ethnicity in the US”

Roch A. Nianogo

March 2nd, 2023: Lon S. Schneider, Keck School of Medicine of USC, “Lecanemab: effectiveness, approval, and why it takes a village”

Lon S. Schneider

February 16th, 2023: Terry M Therneau, Department of Quantitative Health Sciences, Mayo Clinic “Competing risks and the Fine-Gray model”

Terry Therneau

February 2nd, 2023: Erin E. Bennett, The George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health, “Methodological considerations in target trial emulation using cohort studies: estimating the effect of antihypertensive medication initiation on incident dementia in ARIC, CHS, and HRS”

Erin Bennett

January 19th, 2023: Marina Sirota, Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute, UCSF, “Leveraging Molecular and Clinical Data to Better Understand Alzheimer’s Disease”

Marina Sirota

2022

December 15th, 2022: Sepideh Modrek, San Francisco State University, Health Equity Institute & David Rehkopf, Stanford University, “Long-term effects of Local Area New Deal Work-Relief in Childhood on Educational and Cognitive Outcomes over the Life Course”

Sepideh Modrek & David Rehkopf

December 1, 2022: Tara E. Jenson, Zilber School of Public Health, University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, “Environmental Cadmium Exposures, Cognitive Performance in Older Adults, and Subsequent Alzheimer’s Disease Mortality.”

Tara Jenson

November 3, 2022: Tianhao Wang, Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center, Rush University Medical Center, “The ‘cognitive clock’: A novel indicator of brain health”

Tianhao Wang

October 20, 2022: Emma Nichols, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, The use of algorithms for the identification of incident dementia: challenges and potential biases:

Emma Nichols

October 6, 2022: John (Rob) Warren, Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota “High School & Beyond: Turning an Education Cohort Study into an ADRD Study.”

Rob Warren

September 15, 2022: Marcia P Jimenez, Boston University &  L. Paloma Rojas-Saunero, UCLA “Racial and ethnic differences in the risk of dementia under hypothetical blood-pressure-lowering interventions: The Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis.”

Marcia P Jimenez &  L. Paloma Rojas-Saunero

2021

November 18, 2021: Madhav Thambisetty, NIA/NIH, “From Mechanisms to Medicines: realizing the DREAM of an Alzheimer’s cure.”

Madhav_Thambisetty

October 28, 2021: Venexia Walker, University of Bristol, Predicting drug repurposing opportunities for Alzheimer’s disease prevention using genome-wide association study data.”

Venexia_Walker

October 7, 2021: Maria Glymour, UCSF, “Introduction to using Directed Acyclic Graphs to represent assumptions, guide analysis decisions, and argue with colleagues.”

Maria_Glymour

July 15, 2021: Thomas Nedelec, Paris Brain Institute, “Data-driven identification of health conditions associated with incident Alzheimer’s disease dementia risk: a 15 years follow-up cohort from electronic health records in France and the United Kingdom.”

Thomas_Nedelec

April 29, 2021: “Re-orienting to MELODEM”

Re-orienting to MELODEM

April 1, 2021: Zach Baucom, Boston University School of Public Health, “Using State Space Models for Longitudinal Neuropsychological Outcomes”

Zach Baucom

March 18, 2021: Lon Schneider, University of Southern California, “Methodological features & FDA’s regulatory guidance on aducanumab and Alzheimer drug development”

Lon Schneider

March 4, 2021: Terry Therneau, Mayo Clinic, “Multi-state survival models and dementia”

Terry Therneau

February 18, 2021: Andrew Stokes, Assistant Professor of Global Health, Boston University School of Public Health, “Estimations of the Association of Dementia with US Mortality Levels Using Linked Survey and Mortality Records”

Andrew Stokes

February 11, 2021: Julie Zissimopoulos, Price School of Public Policy and Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics, University of Southern California, “Drug therapies for chronic conditions and risk of ADRD:  analyses using claims data”

Julie Zissimpoulos

February 4, 2021: Justina Avila-Rieger, Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer’s Disease and the Aging Brain, Columbia University Irving Medical Center, “Using Multilevel Analysis of Individual Heterogeneity & Discriminatory Accuracy (MAIHDA) to Examine Intersectional Inequalities in Cognitive Aging”

Justina Avila-Rieger

2020

December 10, 2020: Maria Corrada, University of California, Irvine, & Sevil Yasar, Johns Hopkins University, “Statin Use, Hx of High Cholesterol & Risk of Dementia in the Oldest-old: illustration of challenges when analyzing pharmacoepidemiological data”

Maria Corrada & Sevil Yasar

December 3, 2020: Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen, Luddy Family President’s Distinguished Professor and Professor of Statistics, Department of Statistics, The Wharton School, The University of Pennsylvania, “MR GENIUS: A Principled Approach to Robust Mendelian Randomization Interference”

Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

July 9, 2020: Bryan James, Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center, Rush University Medical Center“Implications of covid for dementia researchers”

Bryan James